


Bound by Blood

by mumuinc



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: 5 chapters of completely random overly indulgent TRC character crossovers, Alternate Universe, Child abuse (I mean this is AFTG can't really expect anything less), M/M, Slow Burn, graphic depictions of drug abuse and overdose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-09-21 00:38:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9523517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: Nathaniel was a handsome child, all pale skin, bright hair and pretty eyes, in the same way Natalie was plain and unremarkable, her skin sallow, brown hair flat. They took after too much of their parents. Nathaniel, in particular, inherited their father’s face. Nathan called him Junior.(AU in which Renee was born Natalie Wesninski, six years before Nathaniel.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the girl with blades for blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8422912) by [HeavenlyDusk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeavenlyDusk/pseuds/HeavenlyDusk). 



**Part 1: The Baltimore Children**   
**Chapter 1**

She was four years old the first time she realised that her family was not normal. 

Mary had suggested boarding school. It was a ludicrous idea to send a child as young as Natalie away. Were there even boarding schools for pre-school aged children in the United States? Nathan was not sending his child to England.

Natalie stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the basement as she listened to her parents fight in the den. She was what her doting father had always thought a precocious child, always watching, always listening, skulking in corners to wait for secrets to be revealed to her. Natalie had been born that way, Nathan always told her. Mary wouldn’t understand, he told her. 

And Natalie listened.

She knew her mother did not want her. At four years old, she knew exactly what postpartum depression meant. She’d heard the term tossed around by Mary’s doctors, and learned its meaning before she learned to say “Mama”. It was why Mary wanted to send her away. They had relatives in England, she’d said. People who knew which were the best schools to nurture that spark of genius in their child. If there was no right place to send her in the US, the Hatfords would be more than happy to take her.

Natalie tuned out the escalating sounds of her parents’ voices in favour of treading quietly down the stairs to the basement. She thought she heard someone inside, and Nathan had always told her to keep away.

The door swung abruptly open, silent and deadly. Natalie stopped two steps down as a dark-haired woman stepped out of the basement. She’d seen her once before, talking to her father outside, in the manicured lawn of their grand Baltimore mansion. She had been smiling up at Nathan then, her freakishly straight white teeth flashing between painted blood-red lips. Natalie stared at her now as she emerged from the basement, a lazy smile spreading across her swarthy features as she looked up at Natalie’s dainty pink nightgown, her pale, chubby cheeks, the flatness of the straight mouse-brown hair on her head that she inherited from her mother.

“Hello, Natalie,” the woman said, her tones dulcet, her voice the sound of silent danger.

Natalie stared her down with unblinking eyes. “Hello, Lola.”

Lola Malcolm regarded her with the same coolness she had looked whenever she spotted Mary, like Natalie was nothing, like she didn’t exist. Even at her age, Natalie knew it was because she looked like her mother. Lola did not like Mary Hatford.

“So you know who I am,” she said, still smiling that infuriating smile. 

Natalie stared down at her with the same disinterest Lola had for her mother. From the upstairs den, she heard her mother screaming, her father shouting back. The sounds of a scuffle would probably follow. It always did. 

Natalie smiled when she spied the knife in Lola’s hand, half-hidden by the door that was only cracked open to let Lola out. “You smell like blood.”

The smile on Lola’s face widened to pure delight. She closed the door behind her and tossed the knife in the air casually. Her deft fingers caught the handle before it could slice through her hand on its way down. “Do you want to play, Natalie?”

“Will it get me out of being sent away to school?” Natalie asked. Her smile was gone. Distantly, she heard the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, flesh hitting wood. Flesh hitting concrete. More screams. It was the music of her childhood.

“Oh, it’ll do much better than that.” Lola’s eyes twinkled as she held out her hand, the one not holding the knife. Natalie stared at her spindly fingers for a moment before taking it and letting this strange woman lead her into the basement. “It’ll make you daddy’s favourite girl.”

That night, Natalie smelled more than just the blood on Lola’s black dress. She saw it. In copious amounts spurting out of the the carotid and femoral arteries of some unknown stranger chained to the large worktable in the Wesninski mansion’s basement. That night, Natalie learned what it meant when the maids whispered that her father was the Butcher of Baltimore. That night was the first of the many lessons she would learn from Lola and Romero Malcolm in the fine art of human torture and dismemberment.

With the door to the basement firmly shut, and the sounds of her parents fighting drowned out by the screams of the unfortunate stranger on the basement worktable, Natalie wondered if this was one of the things that school would prepared her for.

It was a few hours before the basement door opened to admit a snarling Nathan, brow split, the capillaries surrounding his right eye broken and on the way to a black-eye as he scowled at his henchmen at the sight of his child’s blank, blood-spattered face. Natalie held up the knife in her hand to show her father that even with the wooden handle slicked with blood, she had not managed to nick herself.

“Dad,” she said, watching blood and entrails drip down the steel to her tiny hand gripping the knife handle, “tell Mom I don’t want to go to boarding school.”

Nathan stared at her for an interminable minute before a smile, mirroring Lola’s, spread across his face. “Of course, Natalie. Of course.”

 

By the time Natalie was six, she knew which parts of the body she could cut to give a speedy, merciful death, and which would draw long, torturous cries for mercy before the victim bled out. She knew how to throw knives with pinpoint accuracy, and she could handle most of the smaller knives that Lola had given her to train with. Her hand to eye coordination rivalled that of Romero’s, and her preference not to learn their fine craft through the use of animal substitutes made Lola fiercely proud of her protege.

Nathan called her his little princess. Mary avoided seeing her whenever possible. Natalie did not mind. Her mother was a strange creature, and she had long ago accepted that.

What she did not accept was her coming home one winter day to bring her a baby brother. His name was Nathaniel, and though Natalie had never seen her parents ever act affectionate towards each other, Nathaniel was every bit her father’s child, with his garish red hair and icy blue eyes that blinked at her with all the innocence of a newborn, and none of the bloodthirsty coldness in their father’s eyes.

Nathaniel was a handsome child, all pale skin, bright hair and pretty eyes, in the same way Natalie was plain and unremarkable, her skin sallow, brown hair flat. They took after too much of their parents. Nathaniel, in particular, inherited their father’s face. Nathan called him Junior. Mary insisted his name was Abram.

But Lola. Lola told Natalie that Nathaniel was fresh meat.

And that was when the hatred started.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part 1: The Baltimore Children**   
**Chapter 2**

The first blow that Natalie knew of was when Nathaniel had grown just past his toddler stage. 

Natalie had just come home from school, private, all girls, expensive as fuck. Nathaniel waited for her, like he always did ever since he was old enough to walk, at the grand double doors of the mansion. In the early dusk of the Maryland winter, Nathaniel’s nanny had bundled him up in a white fleece jacket and red thermal leggings, and with his spindly limbs, he looked like a traffic sign standing in the middle of the sloped driveway. His face was pinched and serious. Too serious for a child not even old enough to go to school.

Jackson Plank, Natalie’s impromptu driver for the day after her previous driver met an untimely end on Nathan’s cleaver after he missed picking Natalie up from school one too many times, rolled the window of the Cadillac down, glaring at the skinny child blocking the driveway.

“Where the fuck is this brat’s nanny?” he muttered, casting about for any of the dozen household help that appear to have disappeared this early on a Tuesday evening. “Fucking snot-nosed kid.”

Natalie didn’t bother to look out the window and simply gathered her books. “It’s okay, Jackson. I’ll get off here and you can park in the back. I’ll get him inside.”

Jackson snorted but didn’t argue as Natalie pushed out of the rear seat of the Cadillac. The flagstone-covered driveway was slick beneath the heels of Natalie’s school shoes and she had to walk carefully to the front of the car, where Nathaniel stood, stock still, eyes bright, like a deer caught in headlights. She straightened and cast a baleful glance at Jackson until he slowly backed the car off the slope leading up to the mansion’s front doors and navigated the vehicle to the back lot.

In the pale yellow light of the lawn lamps, Nathaniel’s eyes looked almost white as he stared up at his sister. Since turning four, he had lost much of the baby fat around his cheeks, and the hooded shadows under his red-rimmed eyes looked ghastly in the artificial brightness. Natalie could tell he’d been crying.

“Hey Nate,” she greeted softly as she shifted her books to one arm and extended a gloved hand to her brother. Nathaniel wasn’t wearing gloves and even through the fine kid leather of Natalie’s gloves, she could feel her brother’s fingers were stiff with the cold. He was barefoot too, and his toes looked blue and about to fall off his feet as he stood on the cold flagstones. “Where’s your nanny?”

Nathaniel looked up at her, eyes solemn. “Lola told Mercedes to go away.” His voice, still high pitched and thin, sounded hoarse. Natalie guessed he had been screaming. Maybe throwing a tantrum. It figures. Small children were absurd creatures, and Nathaniel wasn’t any different.

She tugged at his hands to lead him up the marble steps to the front door. He looked like he was thirty seconds from hypothermia.

“So, what have you been doing with Lola today, then?” She meant for the conversation to be casual. Nathaniel was too sensitive, too serious. He didn’t know how to have fun, the kind of fun that could be had hanging around the basement. The kind of fun Natalie enjoyed since the time she was his age.

“We gutted pigs.”

Pigs. Natalie pushed the door open, thankful for the heated halls of the mansion. It was dead quiet inside.

Pigs. Lola had her brother gut pigs.

“Did you send the meaty pieces up to Johnson to turn into pork steak?” she joked as she toed her shoes off to the side. Color was finally starting to return to her brother’s face, but the seriousness of his expression did not soften as he looked up at her and blinked slowly. Twice.

“Is that normal?”

Natalie chuckled, remembering gutting her first corpse. That was distinctly not an animal. “Whatever in this house is normal, Nate?” 

She glanced at the clock in the hallway. It was seven, right about the time of their dad’s meeting. They had only been waiting for Jackson to arrive from picking her up from school. Now they would all probably be up in the den, and the house help would be cowering in the kitchens, too afraid to move when Nathan’s top lieutenants showed up at the mansion. That would logically explain Mercedes’ disappearance. Natalie doubted Lola would have the patience to work hours in the basement with someone as skittish as Nathaniel. She would’ve foisted Nathaniel back to his nanny before the kid ever showed signs of squeamishness.

“Mom’s not happy,” Nathaniel said quietly, following her up the stairs like a tiny, blood-red shadow as she made her way up to her room.

When Natalie was eight, Nathan commissioned interior decorators to convert the nursery into a room that could be better shared by the siblings. He’d told Natalie that she would get her own room, separate from Nathaniel’s, up in a portion of the attic once she reached her teen years. The arrangement of two siblings of different sexes rooming together wasn’t quite as common as Natalie knew from her peers, but the planning was deliberate: Mary, for all that she loved her son over her daughter, could never be counted on to look after her children, and Nathan wanted his son groomed to take over his criminal enterprise at a very young age. Who better to do it for him than Nathaniel’s sister, who had exhibited a lust for blood from the time she was a toddler?

“Mom’s always not happy,” Natalie muttered as she rummaged through her dresser drawers for a sweater. She needed to strip off the stranglehold of her girls’ school uniform before she could tackle any of her baby brother’s issues. Nathaniel always had so many issues.

She heard him sigh quietly, the sound of clothes rustling, and a quiet yelp filling the silence between them. Natalie turned. Nathaniel had stripped off his fleece jacket and the white thermal shirt he wore underneath to reveal a thick swath of bandage covering much of the left side of his thin, pale chest. There were bruises, both old and fresh, littering the expanse of Nathaniel’s upper body.

Natalie crossed over her bed and grabbed her brother by the arms, shaking him. “Who did this to you? Was it Lola? Did Lola do this?”

Nathaniel’s eyes were wide, frightened and welling up with pent-up tears. “Dad did.” He sniffled quietly and one fat tear rolled down his left cheek, but he didn’t sob or cry loudly, even though Natalie’s grip on his arms was probably painful. “He said… he said I didn’t do well in the lessons today.”

“Oh Nathaniel,” was all she could say as she let him go. The bandage on his chest was starting to spot with a little blood already. And she wondered, briefly, why Nathan would cut up his precious Junior. She had never been subjected to similar treatment before. 

“What about these?” she muttered, gesturing at the ageing bruises littering Nathaniel’s shoulders and back.

He shook his head. “Mom took me to play exy this morning.” The waver in his voice seemed to steady at the mention of the bastard sport. Natalie knew Mary had been taking Nathaniel to a bunch of little league practices in the next town. It was their mother’s way to try to provide her children with a semblance of a normal life. Natalie herself was enrolled in a bunch of public speaking classes that were significantly less interesting than Nathaniel’s exy excursions. She didn’t find her extracurriculars any more useful or enjoyable than Nathaniel’s foray into team sports, and she deeply resented their mother over that.

She looked them over again and decided he must be telling the truth. None of the bruises appear shaped like fists. Once she was satisfied that there was no other damage, she took his discarded shirt and helped him put it back on, before disappearing into their shared en suite bathroom to change out of her uniform.

“Nat?” Nathaniel’s voice sounded tiny and insecure. He huddled on the floor, next to his bed, facing the bathroom door, as if he couldn’t bear the thought of Natalie being away for too long.

“Hey kid,” she replied quietly. Distantly, she could hear male voice streaming from the den in the second floor. Their father’s meeting must be over, and Nathan and Mary would be up at their room soon to collect their children for dinner. Nathaniel looked like he thought the very idea of having dinner with their father terrified him.

“Do you think Mercedes is coming back?”

Natalie knelt in front of her brother and took his tiny, pale hand in hers. His fingers did not warm even when they moved from the outdoor cold of winter into the heated interiors of the house. Natalie used to wonder what was wrong with her brother--he was always cold, always miserable, always weepy in some way. Now, with the large swath of bandage hidden from her view with a thermal shirt, she knew better.

“Why wouldn’t she?” she asked back. He was so very fragile, her brother was. 

“Mom said Mercedes didn’t want to have to keep sewing me up.”

In the next moment, Natalie thought, for once that she might be the one reduced to tears. Fragile, innocent. Broken.

“I”m sorry, Nathaniel,” she whispered, gathering him close, folding her body around her brother as if she meant to protect him. From their father, from what else, Natalie didn’t know. Nathaniel was only four years old.

She hugged him and did not let him go until the door opened with one of the maids letting them know that their parents had eaten before them and that they could have supper in the kitchen as their father’s men had not yet left and there was drinking in the dining room. Natalie thought about Nathaniel’s bandaged wound, the insignificant bruises, and the bright tears welling in his eyes as he waited for her, barefoot, in the snow, and told the maid tersely to bring up their food instead.

That night, after they’d had their fill of soup and sandwiches, and after Natalie had set the soiled dishes outside the door of their room, she closed the door and locked it, put her brother into his bed, before rummaging through her dresser for the set of knives Lola had gifted her on her tenth birthday. These she hid in the pockets of her nightgown, before climbing into the side of Nathaniel’s bed, to watch over her brother as he slept.

The door did not open again until sunrise, and it was time for her to get ready for school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have another chapter, just because. I want to get the whole part of The Baltimore Children over as quickly as I can, because I hate writing about kids. They always talk like thirty-year-old weirdos in my fanfics.
> 
> Nat & Nate? Seriously?
> 
> No, I don't like it, but their names are a mouthful.


	3. Chapter 3

She was fifteen and her brother nine, when Mary announced over dinner on a Friday night that Natalie should start moving to the new room that was constructed in the third floor just for her. She was a teenager in high school, and Nathan agreed that it was awkward for a teenage girl to keep living in the same room as her little brother. Nathaniel looked across the dinner table at her with terror hidden underneath the glare of his black plastic rimmed glasses. Neither Mary nor Nathan saw the fear or pleading in Nathaniel’s face as he stared at her, his right hand absently pushing food across his plate. He no longer trembled now, no longer cried. Years of abuse under their father’s hand and knives, years of their mother’s wilful neglect, had steadied Nathaniel’s hands and created the shield of silence that he brought up whenever in their presence. Natalie was absurdly proud.

She would have said no, even though the room she shared with her brother was starting to become too cramped for the two of them especially as Nathaniel himself was starting to grow into a young man, but at that moment, Nathan had chosen to pick up his steak knife and hurl it across the table in the general direction of her brother and calmly told him to eat his vegetables. The knife clattered across the room without hitting its intended mark, a small mercy afforded by the Butcher of Baltimore to his favorite daughter who obviously had a soft spot for the sniveling excuse of human rot that was her brother. The knife banged on a vase on the side table at the other end of the dining room. Nathaniel hunkered in his seat, his narrow shoulders in a slump as he pushed his glasses up and continued to pick on his food. A maid scurried out of the kitchen to pick it up and replace it with a clean knife on Nathan’s plate.

“Natalie, you need this,” Mary said, her plain features tightened into a severe frown, a marked contrast to Nathan’s coldly calm face, and Nathaniel’s miserably blank expression. Mary’s voice was soft and still carried a touch of her British accent. Oddly enough, while Nathaniel had grown up to look every bit like their father, he had inherited their mother’s peculiar way of speaking. Natalie resented that. She resented everything that Mary Hatford represented, including this patronizing bull crap about knowing what the daughter she barely looked at needed at fifteen years old.

Natalie clenched her jaw. “I don’t think you know anything I need, mom.”

Nathan’s smile was cool and appraising as he regarded his daughter. “Now, now, Natalie, you know that’s no way to speak to your mother.”

She stood up abruptly, causing her utensils to clatter on her plate noisily. Nathaniel flinched at the sound but said nothing, so Natalie did not look at him, and instead focused her gaze at their father.

“I’m so sick of this woman pretending to know what I need, dad,” she growled, brows knitting as she scowled at her father. Nathan continued to eat, unperturbed. “She hangs around me now all the damn time, like it’s any fucking mercy from the last, what?, thirteen, maybe fourteen years she’s ignored my existence? I’m so sick of the sight of her!”

“You said ‘fuck’,” Nathaniel muttered under his breath, stifling an odd giggle by shoving some cauliflower into his mouth. Natalie did not look at him. Unlike her, Mary actually gave a modicum of care for her son. Sometimes. Not all the time. But Nathaniel wasn’t the one Natalie hated.

Mary regarded her with fire in her gray eyes, the same eyes Natalie had the misfortune to inherit. “I’ll watch what I say on this table, young woman. Sit down.”

Natalie did not sit. She turned to her father, scowl deepening at his continued lack of interest in what she was saying. “Dad, I don’t want to move to another room. Nate doesn’t want me to move to another room either, don’t you, Nate?”

Nathaniel glanced up at her from the rim of his glasses, before his wary eyes darted to look at their father, in case he was holding up a knife again and aiming to throw it at his head. When he saw that Nathan was relaxed and continued to eat with only his fork, he shrugged his narrow shoulders, though his eyes were still fixed on every movement of Nathan’s hands. “I’m okay with whatever dad wants, Nat. If he says you need it, then I guess you do.”

Nathan smiled smugly at his son’s reply. “And dad wants his princess to have her own kingdom. Let Junior stay in your old room. We’ll fix it up for him when you move out, okay?”

Natalie scowled at them both. “I hate you all.”

Her piece said, she flounced out of the dining room, to sulk on her own in the room. Neither Nathan nor Mary bothered to follow or check in on her or discipline her after that.

Nathaniel showed up a few hours later, though, carrying his school books and exy racket, into the room. He stood there awkwardly for a while, staring at Natalie’s back, before kicking the door closed and dumping his books on the small study desk beside his bed.

“I’m sorry, Nat,” he said after an interminable silence. 

Natalie did not deign to turn around to look at him. She was still smarting from her brother’s betrayal. Why couldn’t he understand that she was doing this for him? Natalie couldn’t protect Nathaniel from their father’s temper during the daytime, but at least, at night, while they huddled together in Nathaniel’s bed, she could protect him from the nightmares that inevitably came. And they were awful. Sometimes, even until now, five years later, Nathaniel still woke up shaking and screaming and plastered in cold sweat. Nathan did not let up on punishment whenever Nathaniel was out of line or whenever he failed at whatever cruel lesson Lola and Romero had conjured up as his “extracurricular” activities. It’s on these nights that Natalie would startle awake from her brother’s screams, grab him by the shoulders and try to slap some sense into him so he didn’t wake the entire household. The one time Nathaniel had done that, he’d gotten smacked with a hot iron in his shoulder the next morning, a warning that he should learn to keep his mouth shut. Natalie didn’t want to abandon him when he most needed her.

“Natalie,” Nathaniel repeated, voice pleading as he crept closer to her bed. She resolutely ignored him and instead fiddled with the fancy new cell phone she had gotten on her fifteenth birthday. “Please, won’t you talk to me?”

“Well, you obviously don’t want me to, do you,” she muttered snidely. Right where it hurts, she knew. Nathaniel always left himself open to these kinds of attacks, more insidious than the knives and fists. He flinched away from her, as if burned.

“I just…” He sighed. “I just didn’t want him to cut me up again if I didn’t agree.”

She wanted so badly to turn around and comfort him. Nathaniel had gotten the steak knife thrown at him for absolutely no reason, and he was lucky it wasn’t intended to actually hit him, but in her head, she knew just as well as Nathaniel did that if he so much as disagreed with their father, that that knife would be somewhere buried in his arm, or worse, in his throat.

“Please, Nat.”

She firmed the clench of her jaw and resolutely scrolled through the series of text messages from this boy in her new school. She wasn’t going to be swayed tonight. Not for this kind of betrayal. Not even by her beloved little brother.

When she finally stood from the spot of her bed that she had perched on, Nathaniel had already washed up and gone to sleep, curled in on himself at the corner of his bed. His books on American History, one of his weak subjects, were still opened to page 116, but none of the important points of the Civil War was highlighted and the corners of the textbook had little doodles of a tiny brown-haired Natalie and a tinier red-haired Nathaniel playing tug-of-war with one of the fancy curtains from their living room windows. She smiled absently, her fingers running through the lines of colored pens Nathaniel used in his drawings, as she quietly put away his books, and pulled up his blankets over him. She would’ve climbed into the bed with him, like she usually did since that first time she discovered that her brother was being abused, but decided, finally, that Nathaniel’s tiny single bed had grown too small of the two of them. If she didn’t let him go now, she would never let him go ever, and Nathaniel would never learn to protect himself from the abuse.

After she washed up and changed into her night clothes, she took her time to root through her dresser drawers for the knives that Lola had given her on her tenth birthday. Since then, she’d kept them in top condition, rarely using them when Lola and Romero came around for her and Nathaniel’s knife lessons, and she’d bought a fancy leather roll to keep the set in. These she placed carefully on the side of Nathaniel’s pillow. He would have a lot more use for them than she ever would. For starters, she believed once he turned sixteen, he should start carving out that disgusting leer Lola always had whenever she saw him.

“I know you can do it, Junior,” she whispered as she bent to press a kiss to her brother’s forehead, and smoothed away the mass of curls that flopped messily over his closed eyes. “I’m counting on you to do it.”

With that, Natalie finally turned to her side of the room and began to clear away her things. When Nathaniel woke up late the next morning, Natalie’s desk and dresser had been cleared out, and he was alone in their room.

* * *

 

With the new room and the privacy it entailed came new possibilities. By fall of that school term, Nathan held one of his largest meetings yet at the den that he had turned into a conference room. It was Tuesday on the week of Thanksgiving break, and a smirking Lola popped into the living room to tell Nathaniel to get lost as his dad had important guests coming, but Natalie might want to stay to meet some of her peers if she wanted.

“Why should I go when Nat can stay?” Nathaniel demanded testily, the icy blue eyes he inherited from their father glinting in the soft light of the living room chandelier. Mary had gotten him prescription contact lenses especially for when he played exy, and the lack of the black plastic frames made Nathaniel’s eyes look even more unnerving than usual. Natalie smiled at her brother. He was finally growing a spine.

“Because, little runt,” Romero said as he emerged from the steps leading down to the basement, “your sister has boys to meet, and you’re just a snot-nosed little asshole who’s going to ruin that for her.”

Lola sneered at Nathaniel. “You wouldn’t wanna cockblock big sis over there, would you, Junior?”

Natalie rolled her eyes at the same time Nathaniel asked her “What does ‘cockblock’ mean?”

“Hush,” she muttered, glaring at the two adults as they leered at Nathaniel. “Leave him alone. Whoever else dad doesn’t want in on the meetings can meet Nathaniel too.”

Lola laughed derisively. “Suit yourselves, princesses. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

As it turned out, the two of them should have really learned to listen when Romero was the one telling Nathaniel to scram. 

Nathan’s house guest for the evening was Vasil Kavinsky. Natalie had only heard of him in passing whenever she skulked around the second floor hallway during their father’s meetings. A few years ago, Kavinsky ran a modest cocaine cutting and distribution center in the basement of his Jersey City townhouse. The distribution blew up into a full scale, statewide operation when his son, Joseph, started selling the drugs to his classmates in the upscale private boys’ boarding school that he went to in New York, and the family eventually branched out to Ecstasy, meth, PCP, GHB, and an unmentionable list of other party drugs popular with bored rich kids living in New York City.

Vasil arrived that evening in a black Lincoln armored SUV. His wife, a blond pastel trash of a former supermodel in velour Juicy Couture track suit, flounced out of the vehicle after him. They were ushered by DiMaccio into the house through the side patio door to avoid the two children still doing their homework for the holidays in the middle of the living room. Natalie would have ignored their arrival if the roaring sound of a sports car didn’t invade the quiet blanket of stillness as she worked through her trigonometry assignment, and interrupted Nathaniel’s charcoal drawing of his black and red replica of the Ravens exy racket propped on the feature wall next to the entertainment center rack.

Natalie scowled as she got up from her seat among the cushions scattered on the expensive shag carpet, and padded, barefoot to the patio to inspect the newcomer.

A bone white Mitsubishi Evo with a tacky knife graphic spattered across the side doors from front bumper to rear pulled up just behind the Lincoln, its monstrous black grille yawned lazily at Natalie, matched only by the bored smile of the pasty-faced young man that emerged from its driver side door. White, plastic-rimmed dark sunglasses obscured his pale face, and he walked indolently from the paved lot to the patio, his hands shoved into the pockets of his stone-washed jeans. A black dragon tattoo snaked up his left arm and disappeared into the flimsy cover of the white tank top that exposed pale, fragile shoulders. He looked like a poster child warning for the dangers of meth abuse. Natalie hated him on sight.

“Hey, sweet cheeks,” he drawled as he caught sight of Natalie, and pushed the sunglasses off its perch on his straight nose, and up his forehead to act as a headband for his floppy brown bangs.

“Hey yourself, asshole,” she snorted, stomping back to the living room where Nathaniel cocked a quizzical eyebrow at her. “It’s the boy. Joseph.”

“Aww, you know me!” Joseph Kavinsky’s smile was crooked and lazy as he invited himself into the living room, his black biker boots clicking obscenely on the marble tiles. “So, your daddy told mine he had a pretty princess for me to meet, but, sweet Jesus!” The smile widened into a predatory grin as he spied Nathaniel, who had also gotten up from the floor and stood, hiding, behind Natalie, his small, cold fingers clutching at the hem of her lacrosse jersey shirt.

Natalie eyed him coldly. “The meeting’s upstairs, Joseph. You’re not invited here; this is family space.”

Kavinsky leered at her, his pale immigrant face transforming into wicked interest. “Nah, let the old farts talk about protection and drug-running. I ain’t really interested in that shit. You, on the other hand…” he trailed off, bending slightly to shove his face at Nathaniel, whose hand was now white-knuckled on Natalie’s shirt.

“He’s nine, you snivelling piece of shit.” The voice that interrupted was terse, clipped with quiet anger. Mary, all five feet two inches of lithe hard muscle bundled into a seemingly unobtrusive British woman in her thirties, emerged from the hallway leading to the kitchen. She yanked Nathaniel’s wrist away from Natalie’s shirt and pulled her son close. “Get lost, druggie.”

Natalie had never known herself to be relieved at the appearance of her mother, but the sight of Kavinsky’s leering face gave her the skeevies as he tracked Nathaniel’s movement. “Mom, take Nathaniel to his room. Joseph and I need to do some teenage bonding.”

Mary’s gray eyes were colder than the icy shift of early winter breeze that drifted into the living room from the open patio door. For a long moment, mother and daughter regarded each other in detached agreement. For once, they were united in protecting Nathaniel from another potential predator in their midst. Mary gave Natalie a single terse nod, before gathering up Nathaniel’s art materials from the living room floor and dragging her frightened son up the stairs, away from Kavinsky’s hooded, dark gaze.

Natalie tracked their movements until they finally disappeared from view, before she turned to Kavinsky, a slow smile of her own forming on her thin, pale lips as she walked slowly towards the steps leading down to the basement. “Now, Joseph. Lola told me you were… interested… in the Wesninski kids. Care to find out what exactly we do here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Joseph Kavinsky from TRC anyone? Renee's canon background as having been gang-raped and drug-addicted brought this on (this, of course, is different. With all the bodyguards Nathan has for his children, there's no hope for anyone ever trying to sexually assault any of his children while they live in his house.) I've pretty much finished writing Nathaniel's formative years and now working on Renee. I still kind of want to stick to some of her canon experiences, so she's still shaped to be the way she is in the series. I have a lot to think about on this.
> 
> Nathaniel finding amusement over "fuck" and "cockblock" though. 
> 
> Thank you for the kind words everyone has for my (completely unoriginal) fanfic. This is like a whole host of different canon divergence AUs, so I hope nothing gets too weird, least of all the funky TRC crossover character appearances (they're more like cameos, really). I just felt like writing them in (because I'm an indulgent weirdo.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Drug overdose in this scene. Tags have been updated.

Joseph Kavinsky and his strange family stayed in Baltimore for weeks after Thanksgiving. Nathan invited them for their Thanksgiving dinner, during which Antonia, Joseph’s mother, had a near fatal overdose in the Wesninski mansion ground floor powder room. Nathaniel found her when he excused himself from the dinner table because he could no longer handle the weird stares he kept getting from Joseph Kavinsky as he sat across the table from him. He knew that Joseph and Natalie were holding hands under the table but the way Joseph’s eyes tracked his movements made his skin itch. He couldn’t understand how Natalie wanted to keep this creepy teenage boy away from him, and yet spend so much time with him up in her third floor attic bedroom as soon as he drove her home from school.

Nathan looked like he wanted to hurl another steak knife in his direction for interrupting his and Vasil’s conversation with a quiet excuse to go to the bathroom, and he was mostly thankful that there were visitors to keep up appearances with, even though a third of those visitors made him want to run up the stairs into his bathroom to stand for hours under the scalding heat of his shower. He supposed he could take little mercies as they came, and crept quietly out of the dining room and into the hallway.

The powder room door was unlocked and Nathaniel pushed it open to find Antonia slumped unconscious over the closed cover of the toilet seat. A thin trail of saliva pooled on the toilet seat cover, and her mouth frothed a little, as her eyes rolled back into her head. Nathaniel didn’t know if she was breathing and he did the only thing he knew how to do around dead or dying bodies.

He screamed.

“Mom!! Mooooooom!!” His breathing was ragged. There was white powder everywhere in the bathroom. He knew enough about drugs not to step inside lest he inhale any of the foul material, but he had to check if she was still alive. Gingerly, he stepped around her slumped form to check her neck for a pulse. It beat erratically under his fingers. Nathaniel started to panic.

“Natalie! Natalie, someone’s dying!!”

Nathan arrived first on the scene, steak knife in one hand, maniacal expression on his handsome, angular face. 

“Nathaniel!” His voice boomed and rolled around the hallway, making Nathaniel scramble back from Antonia’s body as he stared at the knife in his father’s hand with wide, terrified eyes.

“Dad! I swear, I didn’t do anything to her, she was--I found her like this!” he babbled incoherently as Nathan advanced on him menacingly, the drugged woman forgotten in favor of disciplining his noisy, whining, pathetic carbon copy child.

Natalie appeared a split second after Nathan, shoes skidding across the marble as she slid under their father’s raised hand to grab Nathaniel by the collar of his blue sweater. “Don’t look,” she whispered harshly, forcing his face away from both their father’s angry countenance and the horrific scene of the dying woman in their ground floor bathroom.

Vasil and Joseph were slow to arrive, Vasil’s face shrouded in thoughtful shadow, Joseph’s still split with that lazy half-smile as he caught sight of his mother’s body in the bathroom.

“Oh hey, dad.” His Jersey trash accent coupled with his nasal voice grated on Nathaniel’s nerves. Natalie hugged him closer to her body to shield him away from Joseph Kavinsky. “Look, mom’s decided to start the party without us again!”

Vasil snorted and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Fucking idiot bitch. Call an ambulance and make yourself useful, son.”

Joseph arched a pointed eyebrow at Nathan, who was still staring at a cringing Nathaniel, almost completely smothered into Natalie’s dress. “Yo, Butcher dude. You want cops in your house or does this joint not have a private nurse that can wake my bitch mom up?”

As if on cue, Antonia gurgled on the foam forming rapidly in her mouth. Nathaniel wanted to puke at the sound of her gurgling, but it appeared it finally wrenched Nathan’s attention from him as he lowered the steak knife and scowled at his children.

“Mary, get Johnson and DiMaccio here.” His commands were terse and clipped, a testament to the flimsy hold of control he had over the brimming anger and hatred towards his son. He took a moment to school his features into a more neutral expression as he addressed Vasil and Joseph. “You can put her down on the couch in the living room. This way.”

Nathan turned to Natalie. “Go take your brother to his bedroom, and leave him there. I want you back here and helping Joseph with Antonia.”

Nathaniel hazarded a glance quick enough to look into his sister’s face, wondering if Natalie would ever dare disobey their father, but Natalie’s face was carefully blank as she dragged him up against her and elbowed past Joseph and Vasil to stomp towards the upstairs bedrooms. When she threw open the door to his room, sat him down to his bed and made to leave, Nathaniel’s fingers closed around her wrist in silent imploration not to leave. He knew what was in store for him if she left. He knew the knives would come out again.

“You should’ve let her die,” Natalie declared, as she shook her wrist from his grip. “Don’t waste yourself on trash like them.”

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. His eyes stung, and tears forced painful pinpricks into the corner of his lids. He wouldn’t cry. He had told himself before that he would never cry again, after the tenth time that Mary and Natalie had had to stitch him up. But it was Thanksgiving and he thought that maybe, for just one more time, Natalie might come to save him. But he could almost hear her telling him the same thing she always told him at night, as she stood up from his bedside and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

_“You’re a big boy, Nathaniel. Act like it.”_

He wouldn’t cry even if it meant seventeen stitches after Thanksgiving dinner.

* * *

On Nathaniel’s tenth birthday, Mary took him and Natalie to the finals game of his little leagues exy team. Nathaniel played for the team’s starting defense line, and although the Mary and Natalie stood awkwardly next to each other in the stands, their combined cheers for Nathaniel as he weaved across his striker mark to stop goal attempt after goal attempt made him feel warm.

Nathaniel’s legs burned pleasantly as he sat out the last ten minutes of the game into the final buzzer. His team had won, and the excited cheers of Nathaniel’s teammates were almost higher pitched than the cheers of the parents, guardians and family friends in the crowd. It was the first in a very long time that Nathaniel had felt some manner of accomplishment for himself. He was not a particularly bright student and did not excel exceptionally well in school, so whenever Mary took him to these games or to practices and scrimmages, and he performed well, even better than most of the other children in his team, and he almost felt his chest would burst at the sight of his mother and his sister beaming at him from the stands.

After the requisite final handshake, Nathaniel pulled off his gloves and ran up to his mother and sister as they waited for him at the side door leading out of the court. Because of his scars and because of difficulties in monitoring the son of a major crime lord in Baltimore while hidden away in a locker room, Mary never allowed Nathaniel to shower or change in the communal shower and locker rooms used by the other children in the community center. Nathan typically sent bodyguards armed to the gills to accompany his wife and child whenever they went over to the next town to participate in little league games. To Nathaniel, it was a little absurd, but he guessed it might be because of his father’s reputation that prevented him from joining any exy leagues within Baltimore itself, or even going to school there. Nathaniel was homeschooled with private tutors and Natalie went to school three towns over, where the noise of Nathan’s criminal activities were significantly muted in the backdrop of rural Maryland.

He was still grinning ear to ear, his red hair plastered to his temples, curling just past his eyebrows as Natalie, bucket of popcorn in hand, threw her arms around him.

“You savage little fucker!” she grinned as she ruffled his hair and helped him off his gear. Mary waited off into the side and gathered Nathaniel’s exy racket and armor, walking off a little bit aways to where the bodyguards stood in silent vigilance. One of them took the armor from her to be kept in the boot of the Cadillac that was usually Natalie’s ride to school until Joseph Kavinsky showed up in town. Now, Nathaniel was shadowed and shuttled everywhere by the same Cadillac.

Natalie insisted on draping her skinny arms over Nathaniel’s shoulders as they walked towards the car, even though he protested that he would just get sweat stains on her pretty dress. She carried his helmet for him as well. 

“You need to get me into this game, kid,” she told him as they trailed a few steps behind Mary. “I could really learn some new shit instead of playing lacrosse. I kinda like that I don’t need to have to run on muddy grass on an exy court.”

Nathaniel glanced up at her. Natalie didn’t used to talk like this before, but he was too happy to pay attention. “You should get an exy racket! I don’t think I could teach you how to play with your lacrosse racket.”

“In the summer, baby boy,” she replied, patting his head again. 

Nathaniel looked at her strangely. “Natalie, is something going on?”

She didn’t look back, just sort of snorted and waved a careless hand at him. “Nothing you need to worry your pretty little head about.”

He opened his mouth again, about to wonder out loud how strangely Natalie had been talking lately, when Mary stopped walking and turned around.

“Natalie, that boy is here. Get him away from your brother before I blow his brains out.”

Natalie made a sound that Nathaniel thought was decidedly rude. “K’s here to pick me up.”

“K, huh?” Nathaniel snorted and pushed his sister away. “Are you two dating?”

Natalie laughed, a loud and brittle thing. She didn’t look happy at all. In fact, Nathaniel thought she looked rather manic, so unlike the quiet, steady demeanor of his sister as he had grown up with her. “We’re doing much more than that, little man.” She grinned at him, the expression pulling something unpleasant across her thin, painted lips. “Go on, Mom hates K and you know K likes you, so I don’t think I like how that’d pan out if he catches sight of you again.”

“Huh,” Nathaniel said, extricating himself from his sister’s arm. This was another first: Natalie abandoning him in favor of some guy. He wondered what it was that Joseph Kavinsky had done to his sister since their arrival that had caused her to be so enamored of him.

“Hey, Nat?” he called after Natalie, just as she sauntered over to Kavinsky’s monstrously loud Evo.

Natalie threw him a look over her shoulder, her artfully disheveled long brown hair falling over her shoulders. “Yeah?”

“Do you ever cut him up?”

Natalie laughed again, this time a sound of dark delight that raked over his ears like daggers scraping down a chalkboard. “Every time we’re together, Nate.”

Nathaniel shivered at the dark tone and jogged over to hurry after his mother. In the distant night, he could hear Joseph Kavinsky’s rude catcalls to passing women on the street. He didn’t feel safe until he and Mary were safely locked away in the Cadillac and speeding down the road on the way back to Baltimore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand welcome to Nathaniel's POV. He's so very much a delicate snowflake, but let's not forget that's he's like 9 here, and while he's horribly abused and neglected, Natalie does her best in sheltering him from drugs and death. Nathaniel grows up a different kind of vulnerable because, while Natalie's protection of him doesn't amount to much in the way of preventing abuse when she's not around, she's still a present force that keeps the knives and fists (and hot irons, it would seem!) at bay when she is. She's def much better that sheltering Nathaniel from Nathan's rage than Mary ever will be. (Don't get me started on how much of a twat I find Mary Hatford to be.) 
> 
> Also Dad vs. Sir: I am fairly convinced canon Nathaniel was probably made to call his father Sir, as opposed to Dad or any other affectation, but Natalie calls Nathan Dad, and I just wanted to be consistent.
> 
> On the Kavinsky's: I love my dad & mom mafia/druggie OCs. Joseph and his parents, tbh, are the most fun to write in this entire arc. I love how crude and inappropriate they are as compared to how cultured the Wesninski's appear on the surface.
> 
> On Exy: Sorry, I don't know enough about sports to write competently about it, and I guess that might spill out to the level of Nathaniel's enthusiasm/obsession for Exy. I try, though, I really do.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Drug abuse and underage sex in this chapter.  
> Tags have been updated.

**Part 1: The Baltimore Children  
Chapter 5**

At the start of spring break of Nathaniel’s fourth grade, Nathan emerged from the conference room at the second floor and thundered into his bedroom. Natalie was locked safely away in her own room, probably making out with her disgusting drug-addled boyfriend, and Mary was somewhere in the ground floor kitchens, chewing out the new cook she had hired after the last one turned out to be an FBI informant and disappeared after the first time he ever wandered into the basement where Jackson and Romero had been waiting, so there was no one in his room to buffer through his father’s manic ranting.

It wasn’t anything new: he was a useless son of a bitch who didn’t know how to be grateful for the kind of blessings his family had bestowed him. He was whiny, pathetic, weak, he was too loud whenever Nathan had guests over, he crossed lines calling Joseph Kavinsky gutter scum when he once walked in on him and Natalie doing questionable calisthenics in bed (Nathan called him a disgusting snoop, Nathaniel said the door was open, he’d gotten slashed on his collarbone, but that apparently wasn’t enough), while a small burner heated white powder on a spoon on Natalie’s bedside table. Nathaniel had heard it all already, and the ranting was a minor inconvenience, instead of a catastrophic event that usually ended with him getting new stitches on whatever part of his body his father decided to carve up. He was almost happy for the rants. It meant he wouldn’t get beaten up or knifed through as punishment for whatever minor transgression he’d committed against his better judgment.

And then his father dropped the bombshell:

“Saturday, you and your mother are driving to West Virginia to Castle Evermore. You’re to play exy with Riko Moriyama and Kevin Day.” Nathan heaved a shuddering breath as he glared at his son, who sat placidly at his desk, fingers poised with a pencil over paper in the middle of a drawing. “Do be sure you don’t disappoint your old man, Junior. I’d hate to get a call from Tetsuji to have to pick you up there for whatever reason.”

And then he was out of the room, the door banging shut behind him. 

Nathaniel couldn’t suppress the feeling of wonder that tingled up his spine. He couldn’t believe that his father had been so mad at him and then was suddenly sending him over to no less than Castle Evermore to play exy with the sons of the sport themselves.

Even at his age, Nathaniel knew that Riko Moriyama and Kevin Day were celebrities in the sport he had grown to love. Riko was the nephew of Tetsuji Moriyama, and Kevin the son of Kayleigh Day, the two individuals who had invented the sport. He had met the two of them only once, over a year ago, the summer after his eighth birthday. That had been one of the best vacations he’d had in his short life. Nathan had been away on business, and Mary had taken him and Natalie with her on the trip to Edgar Allan University, where Castle Evermore, the stadium where the Edgar Allan Ravens, and more importantly, the US Court, played their games. 

It had been a strange summer: Mary had told him to play with Kevin and Riko, both boys two years older than him, while she took Natalie out shopping to the European fashion houses factory outlets a few miles from the school. Nathaniel had enjoyed an afternoon of finally being able to play with kids of his age outside his little league team, children who maybe enjoyed and valued the sport like it could be in their lifeblood, just like him. A few hours of practice and play afterwards, the three boys were called in by Tetsuji to the east Tower next to the court, and then Nathaniel’s nightmare restarted as they were ushered into a conference room where his father, the Butcher of Baltimore, did what he did best.

It would have been unbearable, just the sight of limbs being hacked off with a cleaver, blood spurting everywhere, but it was the sound of the dying man’s screams that echoed in Nathaniel’s mind every night since that summer day. The man on the table being carved up like a slab of venison was Nathaniel’s Math tutor. He couldn’t remember if the man had really turned his eyes and recognized him as he stood there with Riko and Kevin, thunderstruck by the bald sight of his father’s profession bared before these two strangers he had just been playing with, or maybe that had been a conjuration of his fevered nightmares ever since.

Mary did not bring him back to Evermore, despite how Nathaniel had told her how much he enjoyed playing with children who played as well as Riko and Kevin did, and Natalie had told him to shut up and never bring it up to her again when they were sitting next to each other in the backseat of the Cadillac on the drive back to Maryland. It was only months later that Natalie confessed she had been the one to discover and report to their father that Nathaniel’s Math tutor had been a police informant. He had never found out how she’d known, because Natalie refused to talk about Evermore or the Ravens or Riko and Kevin since then.

But now… now he was going back to Evermore in less than three days, and all of it just to play exy! Nathaniel could scarcely contain his excitement as he bolted out of his room and climbed up to the attic two steps at a time to burst into Natalie’s room to tell her the good news--

The door swung open to the sight of his naked sister bent over an equally naked Joseph Kavinsky. He was chained to her bed with handcuffs, and Natalie was sniffing white powder from the planes of his chest through a rolled up dollar note. Nathaniel thought he was going to go cross-eyed with his attempts to avoid looking at them, especially at where he guessed their bodies were joined.

“Hey hey, pretty boy!” Joseph called, cackling as Nathaniel scrambled backwards and almost tripped down the stairs. “Think you’re a little too young to be joining us, but just you wait a few more years. I’ll be back to tap that sweet ass of yours.”

He grabbed the doorknob quickly and slammed the door shut, scrambling down the stairs and running all the way to the kitchens to the waiting arms of his mother. He gasped for air as she held him and asked quietly what the racket was about, warning him in whispered tones that he shouldn’t make so much noise when his father was in the middle of meetings, but Nathaniel flapped her concerns away.

“Mom, it’s Natalie,” he gasped again, clutching his chest. In his mind’s eye, he couldn’t unsee the sight of his sister bent over Kavinsky like some two-dollar whore. “I think she’s doing coke!”

Mary sighed tiredly as she gathered up her son in her arms. Nathaniel’s eyes were wild and bright, his cheeks hot and flushed with the shame of what he had seen.

“It’s okay, Abram,” she whispered, stroking his now too-long curls away from his face. “Hush and let your father deal with your sister.”

“But mom! You know dad will kill her if he finds out!” 

There were precious few rules that Nathan ever imposed on his eldest child, the one who could do no wrong in his eyes. The first was that she continued her knife lessons and teach whatever she learned by way of her discipline to her hard-headed little brother. The second, and the only other rule that governed Natalie’s life, was that she would never get into any sort of drug dependence. Nathan valued his people, including his wife and children, to be their most alert and vigilant. Drug use and even alcohol abuse was frowned upon in the organization of the Butcher of Baltimore, as it rendered a person sloppy, careless, prone to make mistakes that could bring in potential leaks. Like Nathaniel’s math tutor. Like that cook who had been an FBI informant.

But Mary did not seem the least bit perturbed. Instead, she levelled her son with a piercing winter gray stare. “You know we’re supposed to go to Evermore on Saturday, right?”

Nathaniel nodded, too weak and out of breath to argue. He wanted to be rid of that image of Natalie and her disgusting boyfriend from his mind so much that he’d almost forgotten about his excitement for their trip to Evermore.

“Go pack your things for the trip. There won’t be any need for you to bring your racket. I’m sure Moriyama will have something suitable for you to use.” She sighed as he stared at her, uncomprehending. “Be a good child, Abram. Go clean your things up and pack up a few changes of your clothes. We might be a few days in Charleston if your dad gets his way.”

 

In the night, Nathaniel’s nightmares constantly took hold. He’d had four months of Natalie away from the room they used to share and still he could not get used to sleeping alone.

That Friday night was a replay of the hot iron ordeal, except twisted to unimaginable cruelty by his subconscious. In his dream, Nathaniel had just finished a set of problems given by his Math tutor, the same one Nathan had murdered not two years ago in that conference room in Castle Evermore. These were complex fraction word problems and Nathaniel relished in the simplicity of the math as he encircled his answers with a flourish, before jumping up from the living room floor to bound to his mother to show off his work. In his dream, Nathan had been sitting at the dining table nursing a cup of coffee, wireframes perched on his forehead, while he mulled over numbers on a spreadsheet like a boring desk clerk stuck in a dead-end job. In his dream, Natalie had just returned from lacrosse practice, her hair damp from the shower she took in her school’s locker room her racquet balanced carelessly on the easy line of her straight shoulders. In his dream, Mary had been smiling, as she looked up from the ironing board where she was pressing on of Nathaniel’s button-downs because he was going to turn nine in a few days. None of these things happened in reality, but this was how Nathaniel pictured an idyllic family scene. 

And then, dream Nathaniel opened his mouth, and his voice sounded a little like slow, distant garbled nonsense, like he was talking underwater. The moment sound escaped the silent tableau of his perfect family scene, Nathan twisted askew from his seat to knock Mary into the far wall, grab her iron, still plugged into the wall outlet. The sight of him advancing on the wisp of a red-haired boy half his size made dream Nathaniel’s vision waver and quiver, as if he didn’t really want to be there--he never wanted to be there!--but he couldn’t will himself to dream of something less painful. The iron smacked, heated surface first, in his left cheek instead of his right shoulder. Nathaniel saw himself hurl in the opposite direction his mother had fallen, like a tortured rag doll clutching the seared flesh of his face. The sound of his voice was no longer sluggish and faraway. It was closer, higher pitched, keening with pain and terror and despair. The sight of Nathan’s cold eyes burned holes into his skin like monstrous laser beams, cauterizing flesh that needed no healing. He could smell burning, he could hear nothing but the ragged screams tearing through his throat as he begged and begged his father not to hit him again, but the iron kept coming, bashing the side of his head, burning through the material of his sweatshirt, over and over until no more sound emerged from the torn flesh of his throat. When finally he fell silent because he had screamed himself hoarse, Nathan stood over the battered body of his son, his eyes flashing, teeth glinting in the pale morning as he smiled a smile that held no warmth or empathy for the broken boy at his feet.

“I can’t stand the sight of your pathetic face.”

 

Nathaniel burst through the bubble of the dream with a silent scream that tore through his lungs into a broken whimper. 

He sat in the darkness, shaking against the headboard of his bed, his full-body tremors causing the wood to rattle noisily as he struggled to remember where he was, struggled to free his mind from the nightmare. His face wasn’t burning, and stiff fingers reached over the fabric of his t-shirt to feel the brand of the iron on his right shoulder, proof from the actual incident that his subconscious had twisted into something infinitely more monstrous than the truth.

He didn’t know how long he had been sitting and shaking in the dark, but eventually, the trembling eased and he could breath again, short quiet gulps of air that turned into hiccuping sobs. There were no tears because Nathaniel was no longer able to cry, but it didn’t mean his body didn’t want to try its damned hardest to make him do so.

He saw more than heard the sound of the door to his room cracking open. A quick, nervous glance at the digital clock on his bedside table told him it was 3:24 AM. There was no light streaming from outside, through any of the cracks in the daylight blotting blinds of his bedroom windows, so there was nothing he could see at the door but the vague outline of a human shape. He was silently relieved to notice that this figure didn’t appear to be tall, so it was unlikely to be his father, but that didn’t mean he was safe. It could be any of his father’s men, here to teach the hard-headed child of the Butcher a lesson in the middle of the night.

“Abram.” The strange accent and firm command in the feminine voice told him it was his mother. Mary slipped into the room, but did not bother with the lights. She moved deftly to the nearest window and rolled up the double blinds some to allow light from the outside to stream in.

Mary was fully dressed in nondescript black pants and a faded blue sweatshirt that looked like it had been swiped from Natalie’s wardrobe from when she was twelve and into ratty hobo chic clothing. Her mousy brown hair was tied down in a tight ponytail almost as severe as the press of her thin lips.

“Get up, Abram, we need to leave early.”

Nathaniel clutched the hem of his sweat-soaked blanket to his chest petulantly. “It’s 3:30AM, mom. Dad said Johnson isn’t coming by with the car until ten.” There were details, and then there were details given by Nathan. Nathaniel made a point not to dwell too much on the former, and to remember the latter like his life depended on it. Most if the time, it did.

Mary only pressed her lips tighter. “Johnson is tied up. We need to take the bus to Charleston if we have to get there by 3pm.”

He didn’t want to get up. All of his joints still felt locked with the remnants of remembered terror from his nightmare. His stomach felt sour with acid that threatened to bubble up his throat if he made any more sudden movements.

Mary fixed him an imperious glare. In the half-light streaming from the single window with the cracked blinds, Nathaniel thought he could see the iron woman that had captured his father’s cold heart. He remembered the times when after failed attempts to practice knife-throwing with Lola, Natalie had stared at him with something akin to the flat coldness in his mother’s eyes, and prompted him to throw the knives again, even though his arms ached from the relentless practice.

He got out of bed. There was no use protesting against anyone he lived with. In his mother’s eyes, he was the same snivelling brat that failed her constantly, the same way he failed his father every time he took a knife to Nathaniel’s skin. The same way he failed Natalie when his numb fingers refused to hold the double-edged blades she had gifted him to learn how to fight properly.

He was washed and dressed and ready to leave within ten minutes. The duffel bag he had packed with three changes of clothing, some travel toiletries and a borrowed notebook from Natalie with pointers on how to review for an upcoming history test weighing in the crook of his right arm. He would have taken his racquet, the black and red Ravens one that Nathan had, in an absurd fit of generosity, gifted him one Christmas when he first started playing exy, but his mother had waved him away from it and grabbed his wrist roughly. 

She moved him along the stillness of the silent hallway of the mansion with quick, whispered commands to stop dawdling and hurry up! They didn’t leave through the front door. The back door leading from the kitchen to the paved lot behind their house where guests usually parked their cars was ajar. None of the dozen household staff were in sight, Mary having sent them off in the evening for their weekend off. Nathan’s black Porsche Cayenne was not in the flagstone driveway, but Joseph Kavinsky’s tacky Mitsubishi sat still and silent in the guest lot.

Nathaniel didn’t fidget out of his mother’s grasp when they slipped out of the wrought-iron gates, also unlocked and ajar, the security box at the corner of the concrete staccato pillar at the edge of the lot still blinking steadily in quiet reassurance that no one could penetrate the Butcher’s fortress.

Once out on the street, Mary hissed for her son to quicken his steps as they rounded the corner, two blocks after the Wesninski mansion, towards where the bus stop would be. Nathaniel knew, from early morning runs with Natalie, that there would be no buses making rounds at 4AM. First trip started at six, when the siblings caught one from the nearby park when Natalie could no longer keep up with her brother’s sprint and the bodyguards were nowhere in sight because nobody doubted that Natalie Wesninski could handle herself and her brother on her own, without the help of hired muscle. There was, instead, a nondescript gray Toyota, idling a few paces after the stop.

Mary pulled the backseat door open and shoved her son inside and hedged him in, shutting the door behind her.

“You know where to take us,” she said, voice still quiet, as if unwilling to disturb the dead of twilight. 

A man Nathaniel had never met before was in the driver’s seat and his flat, brown eyes met Mary’s hooded gray stare in the rearview mirror. He didn’t nod or reply, just pressed on the automatic door locks and sped away. The Toyota’s engine was a constant but quiet hum, different from the imperceptible thrum of the Cadillac that usually brought Nathaniel around town or to his exy practices, and as he curled into his mother’s side and she wrapped a cotton-covered arm over his shoulders, he thought he felt just the tiniest bit of the wired tension in her muscles relax at the sight of the passing night-time scenery unfolding into a dull gray dawn. Eventually, he settled into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

That was the last time Nathaniel Wesninski set foot in Baltimore for the next eight years, the last he would ever see of his father’s fanciful house of horrors, but not the last he would see of his father or the terror he represented.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter of The Baltimore Children. The next part will be Nathaniel through the years on the run. That's like 15000 words of continued torture, tbh. Dig in your heels because this fanfic's ship isn't appearing until something like the 50000 word mark (I hope I even get there!)
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed my take on a Neil & Renee as siblings in this introduction part. Renee will not make an appearance in the next part because I haven't yet decided what to do with her, so it's mostly just Nathaniel and lots and lots of OCs, and maybe another crossover?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major TW: Character death, gore and violence.
> 
> Have another chapter, because I can't stop writing about guns, knives, death and violence.

**Part 2: Body Parts  
Chapter 1**

He was three weeks shy of his eleventh birthday and locked in a dirty bathroom stall in a deserted gas station off Interstate 95. They were still a good thirty miles from Jacksonville, and had little time to dawdle. They were due for a flight to Gatwick in four hours, but he had been bleeding heavily through the swath of bandages his mother had hastily applied to his torso just after they had shaken off the last of their pursuers in Brunswick. His fingers were shaking uncontrollably as he pressed onto the end of the bandages where it ended near his right hip as his mother briskly set a bottle of cheap vodka with only a few swigs left onto the ledge of the sink while she snapped disposable gloves on and attempted to thread the surgical needle with her shaking hands. He could no longer see past the wisps of black waves curling over his eyes, and his vision was starting to waver and dim at the edges, like a badly edited old movie.

“Stay with me, Jonathan,” his mother’s voice commanded sharply. He could feel surgical tape being ripped off tender, abused skin and he whimpered in barely suppressed agony. “Fucking stay with me.”

Yes, that was what he needed to do. He blinked hazily at the worried lines of concentration marring his mother’s careworn face. In the nine months since they had departed Baltimore in the dark cover of a spring night, Nathan Wesninski’s men had caught up with them no less than four times. 

The first had been just three weeks from their departure, when they had been hiding out at a cheap, no name motel in Long Island and Jackson Plank had arrived grinning with barely restrained glee just as he had stepped out of the shower. His name then had been Connor Watson and he was supposed to be a fifth grader just flew in from Canada with his immigrant mother, Meredith. She hadn’t known how Jackson had tracked them and the mess they made of that motel room in their haste to get away, Connor in just a bathrobe as he was shoved unceremoniously into the waiting gray Honda that Meredith had hot-wired, but there had been no use dwelling on past failings too much while on the run. When they were safely out of New York state and well on the way to Vermont, Meredith had dug out new passports and other identification that would change his name to Louis Johnson. 

He had thought Jackson was dead, as the sound of the spray of bullets his mother had let loose still hadn’t completely faded away from his nightmares, but three months later, he and a few other accomplices had found them again while they hid out at an abandoned barn in Ohio. Louis had knifed through two of the men before Jennifer, his mother’s new alias, had grabbed him by the collar and shoved him in the bed of their rusting blue pick up. His tiny, ten-year-old fingers could barely hold onto the trigger of the semi-automatic he had picked up on the truck bed, but he managed to bulldoze through the pain of the weapon’s kick as he covered their escape route to Akron in a hail of bullets. There had been no time to think about the first human beings he had killed with his own hands when there was blood pouring from his split brow and a concussion that threatened to put him out for days.

They were homeless shopping cart people in Cincinnati. Jennifer determined it would be easier to blend in with city folk if they were the type of people that crowds usually ignored. Louis learned to sleep in shelters and eat at soup kitchens and break into community centers at night to get a warm shower or just to be able to be leisurely with water as he brushed his teeth, all the while keeping his right hand hidden in his duffel bag, ready to pull out his gun at the first sign of danger.

This now, the skirmish outside Brunswick, had been the worst. Romero and Lola had come at them with guns blazing. They were better with knives and Jonathan had had plenty of practice dodging blanks that Edith, his mother’s new name, had rained down on him whenever they found the right secluded spots between drives to different cities. Four cities, four names. In twelve hours, he would be a different boy again, but he would be in England, and Edith had said they would be safe there for a while.

But Jonathan had not counted on Natalie being with them.

He had turned when he heard her call for Nathaniel, and that had been the opening Lola had been waiting for as she dropped her gun and dove at him with her twin knives in hand ready to slice his lungs open. 

He had only seen Natalie for a split second. Her formerly silky brown hair was matted and impossibly snarled. The once smooth planes of her face hollowed and pale with drug use. It had only been nine months and Joseph Kavinsky had completely ruined her. And then, Edith Westwood--no, Mary Hatford Wesninski--had done the unthinkable and sank her knife hilt deep in the back of her firstborn child.

Natalie’s eyes had widened and the meager light in the glassy gray of her eyes, the same eyes she inherited from the mother who had stabbed her, winked out as she slid to the gravel. Jonathan couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He was bleeding from ten different cuts Lola and Romero had sank into his flesh, but he couldn’t stop staring at his sister’s unmoving form.

“Why?” The word had barely been out of his mouth before Edith was shoving a shocked Lola off his prone body. She kicked Lola in the throat for good measure, before half-carrying, half-dragging her wounded son back into the stolen gray Lancer that was their getaway vehicle, and high-tailed it out of Brunswick.

Jonathan’s eyelids fluttered with remembered anguish and maddening pain as Edith applied pressure on the biggest of the cuts. Dimly, he could see the needle threaded and poised in her fingers to sew him shut. Edith shoved the vodka into his face.

“Drink.” It was a command, not a request. Jonathan didn’t know why he was sitting in a dirty bathroom with his mother, trying to blot out pain and exhaustion with alcohol as the only anesthesia, as she applied thirteen stitches on the biggest of the cuts. Why couldn’t they drive to Castle Evermore and play exy with Riko and Kevin? Why were they running? Why had his mother stabbed Natalie? 

“Natalie,” he gurgled through the burn of alcohol down his throat. In reality, he could barely feel the pain in his chest as the needle stabbed through skin over and and over. Edith worked in grim, angry silence, not stopping even to look her son in the eye, until all his wounds that required stitching were sewn up. She grabbed wads of gauze and tape and covered them and the shallower cuts, before applying a cool damp cloth to his flushed face to clean him up.

“Mom, why--?” He did not get to finish his question because Edith was hauling him up to his feet and shoving clean clothes roughly into his quivering arms.

“Change. We have a flight to catch.”

 

She did not talk to him for the entirety of the ten hours they spent in the plane and Jonathan knew better than to ask any questions in such close quarters with dozens of strangers that could potentially overhear even the quietest of conversations. They were fugitives, running from the law in Jonathan Westwood’s life that was the Butcher of Baltimore. Edith had just murdered her daughter to buy her son time to get away.

Jonathan drifted in and out of consciousness through most of the flight and the ensuing cab ride from Gatwick to Surrey. There had been no chance for his mother to clean his wounds in the plane or at the airport. There were too many curious eyes on the pale-faced, dark-haired boy with the pinched expression. More than once, one of the flight attendants in the plane had asked them if he needed any help. Edith waved them away, too paranoid to accept any manner of assistance, medical or mundane, from anyone she didn’t trust.

By the time the cab driver dropped them off to a crowded railway station, Jonathan was almost delirious with pain and blood loss. Edith held his left arm in an iron grip as she pulled him out of the vehicle and paid the driver in crumpled bills. It seemed they walked interminably through the station before they found themselves in a parking lot. Jonathan didn’t know if it was a good idea that they were going to steal another vehicle in such a crowded location, but a black SUV pulled up a few feet from where they stood and he was once again unceremoniously shoved into the backseat.

“Mom,” he whispered hoarsely, as pain lanced through his torso.

“Hush,” a voice, distinctly male, distinctly British, whispered back. “Hush, Nathaniel. You’re safe now.”

He wasn’t sure if it was the use of his real, given name or the tight, relieved smile he could see in his mother face, hovering just at the dimming edges of his consciousness. He was in a foreign country, he didn’t know where he was or where they were headed, but it was three thousand miles and an ocean away from his father and the monsters that hounded him. For the first time since leaving Baltimore that fateful spring morning, Nathaniel Abram Wesninski felt safe enough to sleep a real dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to **Part 2: Body Parts**.
> 
> This section of the fic is all Nathaniel; mostly introspection on things that happen while he and Mary are on the run from Nathan's men, his growing obsession with Exy, Riko and Kevin, his frustration with his mother at not having any answers to questions he dare not ask. Writing this felt a little like 10k words of fillers, but I felt that Nathaniel's story, how he came to justify so much abuse on his person, how his beliefs about his mother, about his life, were shaped needed to be told.
> 
> Yes, I know I said **Character Death** up there, but no, Natalie is not dead. She still becomes a fox. But for all intents and purposes, she's already died here for Nathaniel.
> 
> I guess now would also be a good time to say that I do not live in and have never been to the US, so everything about places, directions and stuff I write here all come from Google and Wikipedia, so sorry if there are factual errors about places and stuff!


	7. Chapter 7

**Part 2: Body Parts  
Chapter 2**

“What’s this?”

Nathaniel looked up from his magazine. He had found it in the dumpster a few blocks from the flat, ready to be thrown out with a bunch of old furniture and a stack of yellowing tabloids. It had been a month since he and his mother had arrived to Surrey. Eva had taken out his stitches a week after they’d first arrived, and after a stern warning from his mother not to stray too far from the Croydon complex, he had been allowed outside the flat to get some sun.

He was pale and sickly from recovering from his wounds and Levi and a few of the other younger men that came around Stuart’s flat had taken to walking around the complex with Nathaniel, teaching him how to case a property, showing him what to look for in strange places that could help with escape and running and all of the things that Mary drilled into his mind every night before they slept. By the end of the second week in Surrey, Nathaniel knew how to case a building for potential weak points, how to look for the fastest route to an exit, and though Levi never looked him in the eye, he knew how to draw and shoot the Sig Sauer tucked on the waistband of his jeans better than he could have ever wielded the Glocks and semi-automatics that he and Mary had used back in America.

Mary checked in with him every night, a grim and laconic once over to ensure he was unharmed, and then a review of all the things he’d learned from his uncle and his uncle’s men. She reminded him to keep what was only useful for running. Things like casing a building for weak points of entry were of no use. They were not petty criminals, she reminded him. They had no need to break and enter into houses, and they definitely did not need to know how to disarm individuals. They were on the run for their lives and Nathaniel was expected to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger.

He had some schooling lessons as well. Eva told his mother bluntly that Nathaniel was going to grow up a dunce if she didn’t bother with education, and although Mary resisted the thought of putting him into a nearby school--she was convinced it was a ploy to make her and Nathaniel stay, and Stuart made no attempt to hide that he wanted them to--she allowed Eva to put a few hours everyday to keep her son reading books and solving math problems, like a normal child. Nathaniel knew there was nothing normal about him: drawing his gun came easier than picking up a pencil to work through science quizzes, but Eva told him coldly every night to finish his problems if he expected any supper to come his way. She put him to learning German by the third week and when Mary discovered the phrasebooks and dictionaries sitting on his bedside, her attitude towards her brother’s wife thawed when she accepted that it would make the transition into Switzerland a lot easier if Nathaniel spoke the language. Between the lessons in German, the math and sciences, and the escape artist sessions with the men, there had been few moments for him to be alone and find anything to interest himself with, except for that afternoon.

Stuart and Mary had left in the early hours of the morning, guns tucked into pockets and waistband of pants. Eva, having just returned from her cover job as a nurse, had retired to her and Stuart’s room without a word and only to flip a knife to Levi. Levi had scowled at her and motioned for the rest of the men and women in the flat to follow Stuart, but he had stayed behind to watch over Nathaniel while Eva slept.

After a few minutes of tense silence, Levi had put the knife away in the kitchen, aware of Nathaniel’s wide, staring eyes that tracked every movement his hand made as he carried the blade, and told Nathaniel to make himself scarce. He didn’t need a second telling. Nathaniel had been raring to be out of the flat, away from the paradox of cloying attention and complete ignorance that the adults of the house afforded him. He’d been restless since his stitches had come out, and after days of being cooped up but completely ignored in the house, he just wanted to be outside.

Levi didn’t bother looking when he changed out of his heavy sweater and jeans into a lighter shirt and shorts and toed into his shoes. Nathaniel didn’t bother talking to his uncle and slipped out of the flat to go for a run. His muscles protested - it had been weeks since he’d had any strenuous activity, but the burn in his calves and the sweat dripping down his forehead were welcome signs of normalcy.

Running was the quiet escape to the suffocating atmosphere in the flat. It silenced the questions in Nathaniel’s mind, about his sister, about his and his mother’s fate, about where they would be going next, about who he had to become next, about when they would be disappearing again. He ran for what seemed like hours, down quiet suburban London streets shrouded in a gray, gloomy morning. When he finally decided to pick his way back to the flat, he walked through back alleys and side streets, avoiding the empty main roads, where Levi had told him it would be so easy for his father’s men to snatch him up and stuff him down the trunk of a vehicle and make him disappear.

The magazine he came upon was at the complex two blocks from theirs. It was obviously weeks old and had been through many hands flipping through its pages, but Nathaniel had been easily drawn in by the inset photograph of two dark-haired boys on the cover. It was Riko Moriyama and Kevin Day, and the sports magazine had run a short article about the emergence of Exy in the US sports scene, how the bastard sport invented by Riko’s uncle, Tetsuji, and Kevin’s mother, Kayleigh Day, would some day take the UK by storm, and how Riko and Kevin were the new faces of Exy.

He hadn’t been able to resist.

When he got home and finished his shower, he took the magazine to his bed and cut out the article. Eva had given him a binder to keep the loose sheets of graph paper he used for his math review, and Mary had stuffed a few sheets of paper printed with code that Nathaniel recognized would provide him Stuart’s phone number in between and told him to keep it for emergencies. Now he took one of the used graph papers and pasted the article into it, then he turned back to the magazine to scan for any more useful content.

He looked up at the sound of the voice. Levi stood at the doorway of the room Nathaniel shared with his mother. His face was blank but the quirk in his voice told Nathaniel he was interested.

He shrugged. “I played with them once.”

“Exy?” Levi asked, crossing the room to kneel beside his nephew.

Nathaniel nodded. “I played the little leagues back home… I mean back in…” He waved his hand vaguely, as if that would explain the complicated mix of terror and loathing he felt towards Baltimore and his father’s home. “Do you know them?”

Levi glanced at him. His gray eyes were the same winter shade as Natalie’s, the thin hook of his nose a painful reminder to Nathaniel of his dead sister. “No,” he replied, voice flat as he looked over the article. “But I’ve played before. In secondary school.”

Nathaniel’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Do you still play now?”

“I shoot guns now,” Levi muttered, gesturing at the semi-automatic in his hand. “Stuart thinks it’s a waste of time.”

“Hmm,” Nathaniel replied. He’d heard the same thing from his mother, when they’d left Baltimore and Nathaniel had tried to stop to browse through magazines in convenience stores. Mary had hit him once when he asked her if he could play with a bunch of neighborhood children playing with improvised racquets in Akron. There was one more article, about the Ravens, the Edgar Allan University Exy Team, and how they were shaping up to be the best in the NCAA league, under Tetsuji Moriyama’s tutelage. Nathaniel ignored that one since it made no mention of Riko or Kevin, except in passing, to mention them as Tetsuji’s wards.

“I like Exy,” Levi said quietly, the fingers of his hand not holding the gun twitching over Nathaniel’s much smaller hand when he made to turn the page. “Mum used to think it’ll help me build better muscle mass for jobs that Stuart sent me on.”

“I was a backliner,” Nathaniel said. “I couldn’t really stop them though.” He gestured at the article now in his binder. “Riko and Kevin. They’re really good.”

Levi snorted. “I’m sure.” The contempt in his voice was unmistakable. “Those brats were weaned on that shit. Just look at the shitty numbers on their faces.”

Nathaniel flipped lazily through the magazine. His thoughts were a thousand miles away, to the gleaming wood of the Castle Evermore court, where he could have been playing with Riko and Kevin, instead of skulking in the shadows of Maryland, stealing out into the night to run away from Nathan Wesninski.

“I was going to play with them the day we left,” he said absently. “Dad told me I could.”

Levi stood up, shook the stiff folds of his jeans around his knees and gestured to Nathaniel with his gun. “Put that shit into the rubbish bin before Mary comes back.”

He was almost out of the room when Nathaniel turned to say, “Natalie always said she wanted play with me, but Dad put her to playing lacrosse instead.”

Levi only half-turned to slant a look at him. He looked so much like Natalie it hurt Nathaniel to look back up at him for too long. “Your dad is a sack of shit who doesn’t know what’s for you.”

“I know. But Natalie… she was good.” He sighed. She really was. She was good enough at lacrosse that she could have easily adapted the sport to play exy. Natalie transitioned through things much better than Nathaniel ever had. When he’d first started playing in Baltimore, he’d entertained thoughts of the two of them playing together, Natalie guarding the goal, Nathaniel keeping the strikers from reaching her. When he’d played with Riko and Kevin, he’d imagine what a court would be like playing against them, with his sister at his back to keep them from scoring.

“Hey,” Levi said suddenly. “If I show you something, will you promise not to tell your mother about it?”

Nathaniel stood up and quietly put his binder away. Levi hadn’t talked to him much apart from the rounds in the neighborhood to teach him how to run. He was curious to know what Levi had to say that he didn’t want Mary to find out.

“Come here.”

Nathaniel followed him out, magazine in hand, and into the third room. The third bedroom was a weapons cache and office. Levi didn’t stay with Stuart and Eva, Nathaniel had learned in his first week in Croydon, but in a townhouse in another part of Surrey, but he was in Croydon often enough that there was a cot setup for him in the office, for whenever he stayed over. Beside the cot, handguns and kevlar vests, similar to the ones Stuart had given to Nathaniel and Mary, were kept in drawers and cabinet safes with complicated locks, away from prying eyes in case someone not part of the Hatford organization dropped by unannounced. There were two laptops sitting on a desk shoved in a corner of the room.

Levi motioned towards one of the laptops, which he unlocked with a long and complicated password that Nathaniel could make no attempt to memorize even if he bothered to try. He never did because Mary had seen the way he had looked at the computers, and instantly knew he would try to search out a trail for finding out about his sister and had told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to keep away from them.

There was an open browser window on an article, about two weeks back, from the Baltimore Sun, about the accidental deaths of Natalie Wesninski (drug overdose), Nathaniel Wesninski and Mary Hatford Wesninski (car accident). They were survived by Nathan Wesninski, a respected businessman who coped through the loss of his family by throwing himself into his thriving investment business. Nathaniel lowered his eyes, blinking against the sudden thickness in his throat, the burn of tears that threatened to spill. All these weeks, he had entertained hope that maybe Natalie had survived. Maybe Mary had not hit an artery. Maybe she hadn’t punctured her lung. Maybe maybe maybe.

“Is it real?” he asked quietly. His legs suddenly felt like Jell-O and not from the exertion of his run earlier that morning. Levi pushed him into the swivel office chair when Nathaniel swayed.

“Far as I can tell,” Levi answered gravely. “Your son of a bitch father is covering his tracks though. I thought I saw another article that questioned the overdose, seeing as how they never produced Natalie’s body for examination, but there had been some local interviews with one of Nathan’s men about how they’d seen her die.”

“Romero,” Nathaniel muttered. He had been there. “How could they say she overdosed without a body?”

Levi snorted. “Your dad’s Jewish, isn’t he? No autopsies.”

“They left her in Brunswick,” he surmised. He felt dead inside. As cold and dead as Natalie probably was, left on the side of the road near abandoned warehouses in Georgia, hundreds of miles from home. Killed by her own mother.

“Probably.”

He lifted his eyes. He knew they would be overbright and red-rimmed and haunted, and Levi did not look away. “Did mom know?”

Levi shook his head. “She was the one who looked this up.”

He didn’t know what was more callous: that Mary had killed her daughter to save her son, or that she had kept the confirmation of her death to keep her son’s sanity intact. Nathaniel quietly got up and left his uncle to go back to his room to cry one last time over his sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exy, running and German. Three canon things about Nathaniel that I wanted to talk about in this fic <3  
> My OC, Eva is my favorite OC so far. Elle Driver ftw!


	8. Chapter 8

**Part 2: Body Parts  
Chapter 3**

“We’re not staying.”

Nathaniel wanted to tune them out. His mother and his uncle, that had been the man that had picked them up from the train station, had been at this conversation for weeks now. Mary had been skittish the whole ride to the quiet, ground floor flat in the red brick complex in Croydon. 

It was small, neat and unassuming, and when he had first arrived, almost delirious with blood loss, Nathaniel entertained the fleeting notion that his mother might actually want to stay in the pocket of normal life that Stuart Hatford afforded to them. That was, until the man had broken out two guns and military grade kevlar vests and told them to keep away from open windows. Mary had put him to bed in one of three matchbox-sized bedrooms after cleaning his stitches, given him an aspirin for the pain, and then taken a guarded position next to the window by the bed, gun in hand, ready to spring into action to defend her son.

Over the next few weeks, Nathaniel had enough time to get his strength back, and to notice that there were strange people that moved about in the flat when he wasn’t asleep. Only one of them bore any resemblance to Mary or Stuart, but all of them moved with the same quiet but deadly purpose. The flat was a safehouse, he realized, and from snatches of conversation between Stuart and the strangers who came in and out of the flat, his uncle and his men were the kind of hired hand for protection that didn’t work for anyone respectable. He surmised he wouldn’t have to sleep back to back with his mother, with guns hidden under their pillows if Stuart Hatford wasn’t a gangster himself. He wondered if this was how his mother had lived before he and Natalie were born in Baltimore.

“Don’t be stupid, Mary.” That was Eva and, although she was unarmed and dressed in white nurse’s scrubs before she left the flat during the evenings for a shift at a nearby hospital, she wielded the scalpels hidden in her first aid bag with an accuracy that sent a sickening jolt of familiarity up Nathaniel’s spine. Her practiced ease with the tiny blades reminded him of Lola. 

Eva was a cover, he’d learned. She and Stuart were uninvolved but they pretended, for the rest of the normal folk that lived in the apartment complex that they were a young married couple with no children, and that she and Stuart had a lot of family visiting. It explained the constant stream of bodies that came in and out of the flat, and it made it all the easier to explain Mary and Nathaniel’s arrival. Eva was not entirely part of whatever criminal enterprise it was that the Hatfords ran, but she was a nurse and useful with all manner of medical equipment. She knew people in almost all of the police precincts in London, and Nathaniel was almost certain she went full-on Elle Driver whenever Stuart brought her to wherever it was that he went whenever he was armed to the teeth. 

Mary had gone with Stuart just once, the day they had arrived, and she had been most reluctant to leave Nathaniel with someone who wielded sharp knives the way Eva did. Stuart had told her they had no choice, and Mary had consented only when she extracted a promise from her brother that he wouldn’t try to stop her with whatever it was she planned for herself and her son.

That hadn’t really stopped the endless whispered arguments over leaving London.

“Look at your son, Mary,” Eva was saying quietly as Nathaniel pretended to be uninterested in their conversation. “He’s too young to be running with you. He needs to be in a stable environment to grow up properly and go to school.”

He sat on the floor in the middle of the living room, watching Stuart dismantle his Sig Sauer P320 for cleaning. He had a matching one of his own, given by Stuart when they’d arrived, to replace the Glocks that he and Mary were forced to abandon in that dingy gas station along 95. They couldn’t be caught by airport security holding any manner of weaponry or it would tip off too many security alarms and make them a target again. When Stuart had given them guns though, it came with legal papers and permits to carry. Nathaniel didn’t know if the papers were indeed legal or if his uncle knew any good forges. He had his answer today, though, when Mary dumped new passports, driver’s licenses and other identification papers on the low coffee table where Stuart had been teaching Nathaniel about his new gun.

“Don’t talk to me like you know what we’ve had to do, Greene,” Mary replied. Her mouth was a thin line, the angular cut of her jaws squared, and Nathaniel knew if he looked at her, he’d see the quiet tick of muscle just beneath the skin that told him when Mary Hatford was having difficulty controlling her temper. He’d been on the receiving end of a good smack to the face more than once back in America, whenever he had been too stubborn to follow her lead. “Abram’s not safe here. This is the first place Nathan’s going to look into after--”

After Natalie, Nathaniel thought to himself, and barely avoided flinching. They hadn’t talked about her at all since arriving and Nathaniel never brought up what Levi had shown him. Mary refused to acknowledge the searching stares he had given her when they were alone the first night. She pretended not to hear when he tried to ask his uncle if Stuart had heard of any news about his sister, and she’d hit him at least twice when he actually deigned to open his mouth to ask after her.

Mary shook her head as she picked out one of two British passports from the pile and tossed it to Nathaniel. A quick cursory look inside told him he would be Evan Mitchell, with dark brown hair and flat brown eyes the minute they left the Croydon apartment. He stifled the quiet sigh that threatened to escape his dry, cracked lips. His scalp itched when he spied the boxes of hair dye that came in another plastic bag that sat next to the coffee table.

“She’s dead, Mary,” Eva said evenly. Nathaniel’s eyes flew up to look into her smooth, placid face. Stuart, Eva, and all of the other people who went about the flat and talked to Mary and completely ignored Nathaniel because he was a child had never so much as acknowledged the elephant in the room. That Mary had killed her own daughter to save her son.

Eva probably didn’t know enough about self-preservation in a roomful of gangsters and hitmen because she kept talking. “She’s dead and Nathaniel will be too if you keep insisting on trekking across Europe for that fucking elusive safe haven from your deranged husband.” She snorted. “There is no safe haven for people like us. Not after the things we’ve done.”

“What you’ve done, Greene, is play your cards right and pretend there’s nothing wrong with jacking people with enough morphine to kill a cow when the black suits come calling,” Mary answered evenly, though there was fire hidden in the depths of her gray eyes. “We’re not here to be additional bodies for you and Stuart to command whenever you need us.”

One of the men standing guard by the far window, next to the couch snorted. This was Levi, and he was his uncle too, a half-brother of Mary and Stuart, and just a few years older than Natalie. The resemblance between Levi and Natalie was uncanny. He even had her straight flat hair that he tied up in a low pony tail. But where Nathaniel remembered, with a sharp ache in his chest, how Natalie always smiled warmly whenever she saw him, Levi barely afforded him a second glance since they arrived. Eva had snidely told him that Levi felt threatened by Nathaniel’s appearance. He’d been twelve when Mary and Nathan had married and Nathan had given him a chill smile as he stood in his white suit in the pews next to Stuart, and asked him if he was interested in learning how to fight with knives. Levi hadn’t any idea what his half-siblings had been into at the time.

“You’re never here for anyone, Mary,” Levi muttered, not looking at them at all, keeping his eyes at the slow dance of white, gauzy curtain over the window. “Nate knows you were never all there for Natalie when she--”

“Fuck off,” Mary hissed at the mention of her daughter’s name. 

Nathaniel couldn’t take it anymore. “Mom, is she really dead?”

Mary ignored him and kept her eyes on Stuart. “You know she’s made her choices and I’m making mine.”

“It’s not the smartest choice anyone could make, that’s for sure,” Eva answered snidely. Her eyes kept level even when Mary whipped around to train the gun in her hand to her face. “Are you going to shoot me, Mary?” The chill in her half-smile twisted something in Nathaniel’s gut. He felt like he was going to throw up.

“I will if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

Eva’s smile only widened, and Nathaniel had to avert his eyes if he wanted to keep thinking of her as someone separate from Lola Malcolm.

Stuart finally held his hand up. “No one’s going to force you to stay, Mary. But Nathaniel can’t keep your pace if you keep moving him while he’s half-dead.” His jaw tightened as he finally put his gun away and motioned for Nathaniel to do the same. “We’ll keep the two of you here until his stitches come out. After that you’re on your own.”

The hateful stare that Mary leveled on her brother was acid in Nathaniel’s gut. “Fine.”

 

That night, Nathaniel couldn’t keep his mind off what Eva and Levi had hinted at about Natalie’s fate, and the choices she’d made that his mother had alluded to. He kept his eyes closed, his body still as he lay on his side, back to his mother’s back, hand under his pillow next to his gun, but his mind was elsewhere, wandering back to the deserted block of abandoned warehouses outside Brunswick, where Lola and Romero and Natalie had caught up with them. Where Nathaniel had seen his mother stab his sister in the back. Where Mary had barely given her daughter’s dying body a second glance before she was hauling Nathaniel out of danger, away from his father’s men.

His finger twitched at the memory, and Nathaniel pressed his eyes shut restlessly. He had to know.

“Is she really gone?”

His voice was barely a whisper. Just a quiet push of air that even Mary, pressed against his back, would have had difficulty hearing if she wasn’t so keenly attuned to her son. But she heard him.

Mary moved quietly to sit up against the headboard of the twin bed they shared. Nathaniel’s body was just small enough to fit next to his mother’s, the space between them suddenly vast and disconcerting, so he sat up as well, his eyes fluttering open to search hers in the darkness.

“Listen to me, Abram.” Even in the stillness of the suburban night, Mary’s eyes glittered as she pinned him with a determined glare. “There is nothing left there for you. Nothing.”

Even without looking, he knew what she meant. Baltimore. Natalie. 

“Do not make the mistake of trying to go back to look for her. Do not try to contact anyone from there to find out what happened. You do not look back.” Her hand snaked forward to grab roughly at the collar of the loose t-shirt that Levi had lent him because Stuart had decided that Nathaniel’s clothing gave too much away of who he was, even though all Nathaniel owned at this point were fraying gray sweatshirts and threadbare jeans ripped from all the near misses of their escapes from Nathan’s men.

Her other hand loosened from the gun at her side to grab his arm and shake him, almost roughly to make her point. “Do you understand, Abram? I want you to understand. Say that you do.”

Nathaniel swallowed against the dry, rough gravel in his throat. “Why did you do it, Mom? Natalie wasn’t going to--”

“She was,” Mary hissed, and jostled him again in her arm. His stitches screamed at his body in protest. “Now I want you to swear that you understand me. Do not look back. Do not look for her.”

Nathaniel stared at her face with wide frightened eyes. In that moment, there was nothing of Nathan in him: his hair was black and unevenly cut, part of the last disguise that Mary had made for him, his blue eyes, free of the flat brown contact lenses Mary had him wear, filled with fear instead of murderous intent. “Natalie--”

“Swear it, Abram!” Mary shook him again roughly. 

“You’re hurting me,” he whimpered, eyes filling with tears. But with the years of abuse and the years of neglect, the absence of his sister, the one person who he trusted enough with the vulnerability of his tears, the dam never broke. Mary continued to grip him painfully and pin him with the hard grit of her determination to keep her son alive. He didn’t know how to fight this without her, without Natalie at his side, to protect him from this strange world of guns and secrets and knives and blood. 

Nathaniel swallowed again and averted his eyes from his mother’s glare. “I won’t look back. I won’t look for her.” He blinked away the tears before they threatened to fall, and looked back at his mother. This was a promise. They couldn’t stay alive if Nathaniel could not keep it.

Mary nodded finally, wearily, and the tense line of muscle in her arms finally relaxed. She let him go.

“Go back to sleep.”

Nathaniel shut his eyes against the bone-deep fear that settled and threatened to strangle his heart. His sister was dead. His mother was right. There was no point in trying to look for Natalie. There would be no point in trying to find out what had happened. He had seen with his own eyes the way the meager light that wasn’t dimmed by drugs snuffed out in her eyes when Mary’s blade sank in her back. If they wanted to be safe from the Butcher of Baltimore, he needed to cut all ties and leave all his baggage behind. There was no point carrying them here, an ocean apart from Maryland, a world away from the blood and murder of Baltimore. And he knew she was right about staying as well. In Croydon, they were safe from Nathan Wesninski, but they would only be safe if they bought into the same creed of killing that the Hatfords subscribed to.

Nathaniel settled back into the tiny space Mary had made for him and shut his eyes and hoped for darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's delve into the promises that Nathaniel made to his mother, and the deal Mary had to make to keep him alive. Not to mention a generous helping of child abuse. Poor Nathaniel!
> 
> I am ever so thankful to everyone who has taken the time to write my (completely unoriginal) story, and love it when you post your comments on the endless trouble Nathaniel finds himself in!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Child abuse and panic attacks.

**Part 2: Body Parts  
Chapter 4**

By the time Nathaniel was fourteen, he had already gone through seventeen names, the same number of cities, and five countries that spanned the Atlantic. He had been a Stefan, a Chris, an Evan. All of them were essentially the same: skinny dark haired boy, with flat, dark eyes, living with his mother. Formal education was entirely dependent on the cover story Mary and her inexhaustible list of contacts could come up with. Sometimes, they were a nuclear family with his mother having a white collar job that she could work from whatever home her forged papers could afford them to get. These were the times that Nathaniel was able to go to school. In Germany, Switzerland and France, it had been fairly simple, sometimes even necessary, for these middle-income, white collar covers. Mary’s contacts across Europe were generous in their assistance. She was, after all, still part of one of the biggest crime families in Western Europe, if only by name.

The last of these attempts at normalcy ended after the two of them left Canada. The encounters with Nathan and his men had been few and far between, sometimes it took months before they caught on to their locations and covers. Montreal had been one of the most quiet, and the only reason that Nathaniel could think of for Mary to go back to the United States was that they had been in Canada for eleven months, and they had never stayed in any one city for longer than that.

A return to the US meant changes, of course. The Butcher of Baltimore was best known in the northeast states, but his criminal organization’s reach spanned most of continental America. Nathaniel couldn’t, for the life of him, fathom why Mary would insist on coming back to America if they had to live in squalor in order to blend in with parts of society people paid least attention to. He thought they were done being homeless, shopping cart people after Cincinnatti, but by the time they traveled through Vermont on the way south, Mary had them sleeping in homeless shelters and eating at soup kitchens again, and when Nathaniel dared to question why, his mother had dug a nasty finger into the bullet-hole scar he had gotten in Marseille, when Nathan had caught up to them that one time, and told him that respectable people meant a paper trail, and a paper trail meant certain death for people like them. They needed to become ghosts.

It was easier to shut up and follow his mother’s instructions. When he was younger, there were occasions when his mother chalked his stubborn willfulness to a soft, easy life in the lap of luxury as the Butcher’s son. But Nathaniel was growing up into a young man now, and there was no excuse for insubordination, especially if it could get the two of them killed.

So when Mary took their beat-up Chevy down a rutted dirt trail into a dusty trailer park in no-name Virginia, Nathaniel said nothing, and just continued to stare out at the sad, drooping gables of the gray, dusty double-wides that dotted the park. It was late afternoon, and where other neighborhoods they had lived in had always had children playing on the street or courtyards, this place only had dust blowing through sun-bleached, cheap rocking chairs and junk scattered in various makeshift yards. 

No one was outside except for a skinny, sad-eyed boy sitting on the front steps of the first double-wide in the park.

Nathaniel watched him with similar sad eyes. This was going to be his life for the next however many months it would take for his father to find them again.

Mary killed the engine of the car in front of the one of the peeling metal houses, about two trailers down from Sad Kid, and Nathaniel stepped out of the car and stretched, before retrieving his duffel bag from the backseat. Mary had stashed her own things in the boot and these she picked out carefully, even as her eagle eyes surveyed the surroundings. There was nothing suspicious in the neighborhood. Even the grubby clotheslines holding threadbare laundry was the picture of impoverished America, and Nathaniel had seen it all in their mad drive from Ohio to Georgia four years back.

They walked in silence up the steps to their new home, Mary glancing warily when neighbors poked their heads out of grimy kitchen windows to look at the newcomers, Nathaniel jumpy when a woman from the next trailer swung open her door to look them over. She took in the faded, worn clothes, the sad droop of shoulders of the newcomers, the blooming reds and purples of a fist-sized bruise on Nathaniel’s left eye, souvenir from the most recent visit from Nathan’s people, shook her head and fumbled for a cigarette, before slamming her door shut.

“Alex, stop dawdling and get inside.”

Nathaniel hung his head and shuffled in. The doublewide that they’d obtained from Mary’s contact in Richmond was an improvement from sleeping in homeless shelters, but only marginally so. It still reeked of stale liquor and rat piss, and the unmistakable stench of chemicals that told him whoever once lived here had probably run a meth lab somewhere within the trailer, but it was furnished and looked clean enough to live in for a while. At least, he thought, it was better than living in by-the-week motels and trashy apartments. It didn’t look like anyone in the neighborhood would cause any real trouble, if the sight of domestic poverty of their neighbors were any indication.

The trailer had a functional kitchen, a few ratty chairs, a rickety table, and two tiny bedrooms. They would only sleep in one of them. The paranoia after too many close calls with Nathan’s men was too fresh, too raw for either of them, even though many of the wounds from these skirmishes had faded into scars.

“Am I going to school here?” he asked after they had spent a good hour scouring the place for any sign that could betray their presence to Nathan’s people. The house was clean, there were no bugs, listening devices, or any other sign that it was anything other than an abandoned trailer that had seen better days.

Mary nodded before she fumbled into her pockets for her own cigarette and lighter. “We’ll look for one tomorrow. Remember who we are.”

It wasn’t as if he could forget. His name here was Alex Lawson. The passport in his jeans pocket said he was sixteen years old, even though he was only fourteen. They were a down-and-out family whose father had left them, and his mother was too poor to afford better living conditions for her teenage son. Mary had drilled the cover into his head the entire two-hour drive from Richmond, until Nathaniel could remember only his name here and who he was here. There were no other names, no other fourteen-year-old boys with ridiculous scars. Just Alex. He needed to be Alex.

“Is it okay if I walk outside for a while?” He thought he saw something like a racquet leaning against the wall of Sad Kid’s double-wide. He hadn’t been sure if it was a lacrosse racquet or an Exy one. Mary had beaten him several times in the past whenever he showed any interest in Exy, in sports, in anything that would ever compromise their situation including talking to and meeting other children outside of various school requirements, but Nathaniel was restless and lonely, and his mother’s stern, laconic company was no company at all for a teenage boy.

Mary collapsed into one of the ratty armchairs in the tiny living room and looked up at him through the haze of cigarette smoke billowing around her head. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

“Yes, mom.”

The late afternoon was just deepening into dusk and ugly fluorescent white lights started filtering through the ratty curtains of double-wide windows. Nathaniel shuffled along the flat, dusty, dirt until he found the sad-eyed boy he had seen earlier in the drive to their house. He had moved off the steps and into the adjacent garage to tinker on an ageing Ford pickup that looked like it would never run again. There was no sight of the racquet he had previously spied, but the boy appeared to be wearing a gym hoodie bearing a local school’s insignia, so maybe he’d just come from a practice or a game.

“Hello.” His voice was hoarse from lack of use, and from the painful necklace of bruises when Jackson had tried to strangle him into submission before they managed to escape the dirty Washington motel where they had last been caught.

The other boy straightened from where he was bent over the propped up hood of the pickup. His clothes were immaculate but his hands were gritty from engine oil, and there was a swipe of the same black grease on his face, right over an ageing green and yellow bruise on a finely sculpted cheekbone. He had at least a foot on Nathaniel, and the way he moved told him he was probably older. There was a measure of self-confidence in the way he stepped away the Ford, and wiped slim fingers into a rag that he took from the table overflowing with tools.

“You’re the new kid,” the other boy said, his pale blue eyes flickering over Nathaniel’s messy black hair, his flat, brown contact lense covered eyes, and the fraying gray sweater that hung loose on thin, narrow shoulders. “Welcome to Henrietta.”

He didn’t sound at all welcoming. If anything, he sounded like he hated the place. And Nathaniel could understand perfectly why. There was nothing to like in the flat, dusty landscape and the drooping, rusted homes that littered the trailer park.

“I’m Alex,” he said, attempting to mimic the rolling southern accent he heard from the other boy, and managing a pretty good approximation of it despite his abused throat. “We moved here from Washington.”

“Adam.” The other boy nodded at him but didn’t attempt to extend a hand to shake. That was okay. Nathaniel didn’t like being touched. 

Adam, he learned, didn’t like it either, as the two of them maintained a fair distance from the other even while they talked. Adam was a junior and a scholar at some posh private boys’ school in the center of the town, fifteen minutes from the trailer park. Nathaniel had seen the old stone of the buildings from the highway. By Adam’s description, it was probably not going to be the school that Mary would bring her son to, especially when he was pretending to be two years older than he actually was. Nathaniel didn’t need a private Ivy League prep school. He just needed to be in any old school to keep up the pretense of being normal.

Nathaniel learned that Adam worked an afternoon and a night time job, one at a warehouse, and another at a trailer park factory outside the town. He had a third job at an auto body shop nearby, that he was going to be late to if he didn’t get going soon.

“Well, why don’t you go now?” It didn’t seem like a stretch to do so. Adam’s rusty bike was just leaning on the side of the double-wide.

His dust-colored mop of hair swayed a little when he shook his head abruptly. “Can’t get my gym clothes dirty.” He waved careless in the direction of his house. “Door’s bolted too so I can’t get a change of clothes.”

“Why?”

“Dad’s busy,” Adam replied, voice clipped. Nathaniel wondered if “busy” meant busy working on something or busy ignoring his son, who was trapped out in the cold, gathering dusk. He wondered if the bruise on Adam’s face had anything to do with his dad being busy. Just like Nathaniel’s father.

“I need to get back soon. My mom and I have to look for schools for me tomorrow.”

Adam nodded, straightening from the stoop where he and Nathaniel had been sitting while they talked. Nathaniel stared at the way he shook out the cricks in his legs as he stood. Adam was fine-boned, thin, but wiry. He would have been a handsome boy if his face wasn’t so gaunt, and dirty and littered with bruises. He extended a hand to help Nathaniel up, and Nathaniel only stared at it for half a beat, remembering how Adam didn’t want to shake his hand earlier, before taking it and letting the other boy haul him up.

“There’s a public school district here,” Adam said. “Mountain View High School. My girlfriend goes there.”

“Okay.” He was about to start off to leave Adam, who had turned back to the pickup, when he stopped and thought about what he really wanted to find out. “Do they have Exy in Mountain View?”

Adam peered at him from behind the hood of the pickup. In the pale, unforgiving fluorescent light of their garage, his blue eyes reminded Nathaniel uncomfortably of his own, of the eyes he inherited from his father. “Yeah.” He gestured vaguely towards the front of the double-wide where Nathaniel spotted the racquet still leaning against the metal wall where Adam had left it earlier. “I played for the school team before, but Aglionby only has lacrosse. Racquets aren’t that different, so I get by with my old one for regular practice. School provides racquets for games.”

“Okay,” Nathaniel nodded. “Do you still play Exy?”

Adam shrugged. “If I can find someone to play with. I’m not on the Mountain View team anymore. Do you?”

He remembered his mother’s fists the last time he so much as slanted a glance at an Exy court and shook his head. “No. We can’t really afford gear for team sports.”

He thought the wry twist of Adam’s mouth may have mirrored his own as they both stared at the double-wide that Nathaniel had emerged out of. If anything, it was trashier than the one Adam lived in. “Yeah. I get that.” He smiled at Nathaniel. “See you around, Alex.”

* * *

Nathaniel didn’t tell his mother about Adam, but that was alright because Adam didn’t really talk to him much after the day they arrived. He was a quiet, unassuming kid, rarely ever at home during the day since he worked so many part-time jobs, and within a week, Nathaniel realized that had a lot to do with Adam’s father being “busy” that first day they met.  
From the fist-shaped bruises that Nathaniel spied on occasion whenever Adam wore short-sleeved clothing, or the smaller finger-shaped marks on his wrists, Nathaniel knew abuse when he saw it. Adam did not say anything though, and Nathaniel never asked, because Adam had politely never mentioned the bruises that littered Nathaniel’s face and neck either.

Nathaniel quietly went to the school that Adam had pointed out, while Mary found work at one of the local businesses in town. He knew his mother didn’t really have to work but it would seem suspicious if she stayed at home with no apparent means of income, and Nathaniel’s school was in town anyway, allowing both of them to be within short driving distance from each other during the daytime, in case they needed to make a clean escape.

In the evenings after school, Nathaniel sat at the stoop of their trailer, staring out into the gathering night. Sometimes, Adam would stop by if he wasn’t working or out with his friends and help him out with his homework. He was two grades above his actual age, and having difficulty keeping up with the rest of his class, and Mary only had so much patience with helping her son work through Trigonometry problems and English papers. Sometimes, when Adam was hanging out at the carport of their trailer, Nathaniel would wander in and Adam would teach him a few things about cars. Nathaniel was never interested enough in the technicalities of how to maintain or run a vehicle. He’d known how to drive since he was eleven when he and his mother went on the run, but he knew nothing more than that and wasn’t really interested in knowing anything more about cars, until Adam taught him how to hotwire manual transmission vehicles.

On a few occasions, Nathaniel caught Adam in town with his friends. 

He’d been looking for help in biology homework and had taken to waiting at a pizza parlor for his mother to finish work, when he spotted Adam and three of his school friends walk into the pizza parlor. They were still in their Aglionby uniform, like four kings swaggering through Henrietta. One of them, the one with the shaved head and an angry-looking tattoo snaking up the back of his neck, was twirling the keys to the fancy BMW parked outside the pizza parlor.

Nathaniel eyed them with a mixture of envy and resignation as they talked and laughed on their way to a booth at the other end of the store. They were so maddeningly normal, with their carefree teenage boy lives, that he couldn’t help but feel a small bit of resentment at the miserable quest for survival that was his life.

He hadn’t meant to walk over to their booth, he and Adam weren’t friends by any stretch of the word, but Adam was kind, and he was already on his feet, his science notebook clutched in one hand before he realized he was standing at their table. Adam’s friends stopped talking and Tattoo Boy sneered at Nathaniel’s approach, just as one of the waitresses also approached their table.

“Hey Sargent, don’t you have a dress code against hobo chic?”

Nathaniel stopped short. He’d never been self-conscious about the way he dressed--it was a necessary point of most disguises to wear pale bland colors that let him blend in more easily, and the seven or eight changes of clothing that he owned were clean, if a little worn. He didn’t think he looked like a hobo, at least not like when they were shopping cart people in Ohio, but Tattoo Boy’s piercing stare made him want to fidget with the fraying cuffs of his oversized sweater.

Adam’s other friends sniggered good-naturedly, even as he rolled his eyes and stood up to step out of the booth. 

“Hey Alex,” he greeted, just as the waitress arrived to thwack Tattoo Boy and sternly remind him that she was more of a mind to throw Aglionby bastards out the door than paying customers not wearing their shitty uniform. “Is that biology homework?”

Nathaniel scratched his head, suddenly embarrassed as he looked down on his tattered notebook and then up at Adam’s smiling face, and then back at the cheerful banter of his friends. He was suddenly so intensely jealous that Adam, trailer trash, abused, scholarship kid Adam, would have this kind of friendship with these three other boys, and if the way he and the waitress exchanged glances was any indication, she was probably the girlfriend he spoke of, while Nathaniel was jumping at shadows and trying to convince himself that the Butcher wasn’t lurking behind the pizza parlor counter with his axe and cleaver.

“Um yeah, I was hoping you could--but I guess you’re busy, so maybe later when you get home?” he finished with a rush. He could feel his face heat up as Adam’s friends stared at him openly.

One of the boys, a thin, reedy boy with pale blond hair and a dark, giant bruise on his elfin face smiled uncertainly at Nathaniel. “You remind me of someone.”

Nathaniel’s eyes widened as he quietly wracked his brain for any hint that he may have met this boy. He couldn’t have! He’d never even been to Virginia until his mother moved them there six weeks ago.

“Yeah, he reminds you of starving children in Africa,” Tattoo Boy said snidely, punctuating his words with a pizza slice shoved into Nathaniel’s face.

The fourth boy in the group, a handsome young man with straight, patrician features, frowned at Tattoo Boy. “Ronan. Lynch.”

“I’m just saying! Kid could do with a few extra pounds on him so he isn’t swimming in his Salvation Army sweater.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Goodwill. Salvation Army has questionable practices for a charity organization,” the waitress chimed in with a self-righteous glare at Ronan Lynch.

Adam rolled his eyes at all of them. “Can you guys not insult my friend?”

“Oh ho! Parrish has a friend outside of school!” Ronan crowed. “Say it ain’t so, man. Gansey’s gonna feel so betrayed.”

“Stop projecting, Lynch,” Adam sneered. “Alex is my neighbor. Alex, these delinquents are my friends, Gansey, Ronan and Noah.“

The blond boy called Noah waved a wispy hand. "I've been dead seven years." His other friends rolled their eyes. Declaring one's deadness apparently was a common occurrence. Nathaniel didn't know whether he was being absurd or just generally creepy.

“I know you,” said the waitress, smiling at Nathaniel and making him fidget even more. “You sit in my math class. Lawson, right?”

He nodded. She was pretty, now that he focused on her. As pretty as Adam looked, and Nathaniel thought, with another twinge of jealousy, that they made a very good-looking couple. 

“You’re that math whiz that makes short work of calculus.” She smiled at him and held out her hand, which he stared at before very self-consciously taking it, just a touch of fingertips before hastily withdrawing his hand. “Blue Sargent. I sit a few rows down from you. You’re in French class too, right? I’m not taking it, but I’ve heard a few of the other girls there talking about you.”

He didn’t know exactly what to feel upon finding out that people in school were talking about him. His mother probably wouldn’t be too happy.

“Um,” he said, turning back to Adam. “Do you think you’ll have time to go over this with me later? Mom might not--”

“Nathaniel!” 

He startled, whipping around fearfully at the sound of his name, eyes casting about for any sign of Lola or Romero or Jackson-- but it was the blond-haired kid who had called him by his name. How did he know? How did he know his name how did he know?!

He wasn’t entirely sure what happened next. The walls were closing in on him and he couldn’t breathe as he stared in horror at the four boys talking and laughing in the booth. The blond-haired boy’s smile had dropped and he was looking him over with concern in his pale eyes. Blue was talking but he couldn’t quite hear what she was saying. Adam was talking, was calling his name. Not Nathaniel. Alex. His name was Alex. Alex Lawson, he was sixteen years old, from Antietam Lane, in Henrietta, Virginia…

“Alex, it’s okay,” Adam repeated in his ear, taking him by the wrist and crowding him into the booth until he sat heavily. “Alex, Alex, listen, I’m going to find your mom, okay?”

“N-no,” he stammered, getting up and swaying unsteadily on his feet, but he didn’t sit back down in the booth. Adam’s friends were all looking at him with wide, concerned eyes. “No, I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Ronan said flatly.

“Alex, you’re about two breaths from a panic attack,” said the handsome boy Ronan had called Gansey. “Have you eaten? Why don’t you join us--”

“No!” Nathaniel said more forcefully, wrenching his wrist out of Adam’s grasp. He was still staring at the blond-haired boy, who was now looking at him with sad but knowing eyes. He couldn’t stand it. He knew! What if he was someone paid off by the Butcher? Nathaniel needed to warn his mother. He needed to--

“It’s okay, Alex,” Adam said softly, though he didn’t grab his wrist anymore after Nathaniel twisted his fingers together and clutched them to his stomach. He turned to his friends with an apologetic wave. “Guys, sorry, I think I need to get him home. His mother might not be too happy if he has a panic attack here.”

“I’m fine,” Nathaniel repeated, but Adam wasn’t listening as he shuffled him away from the booth he shared with his friends, swinging by Nathaniel’s table to swipe the rest of his school books.

“You’re not fine, Alex. I thought you were going to pass out a while there.”

Adam’s friends were waiting for them at the entrance of the pizza parlor. Nathaniel hadn’t noticed them get up, so he took his books from Adam and made to leave on his own. Ronan moved to block his way, and Gansey touched a light hand over his shoulder. It was all he could do not to shrink away from the touch.

“We’ll take you home,” Gansey said, simply.

Adam nodded. “I’ll get my bike to Ronan’s car.”

“I’m sorry I called you Nathaniel,” the blond boy, Noah, said, so softly Nathaniel was sure he was the only one who could hear. “I swear no one’s coming after you. I just… I need to be better with other people’s secrets.”

Nathaniel stared at him. “I don’t have secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets,” Noah said sadly. “It’s okay, Alex. You should let Adam and Gansey take you home though.”

 

Neither he nor Adam fared very well that night. Adam had to tell his mother that Nathaniel nearly broke down in a panic attack when one of his friends called him by the wrong name. Mary had stared down the other teenager suspiciously but Adam never recalled what name Noah had called him, and had assured her that there were occasions when Noah said a lot of random, weird things, and calling Nathaniel some other boy’s name was just one of those things about Noah. Mary gave his friend some bullshit explanation about Nathaniel always being mistaken for other boys in his previous school, and Adam accepted this quietly and left. When Adam went home after his late night shifts later on, Nathaniel thought he could hear Adam’s dad yelling at him for poking his nose into shit that didn’t concern him.

The next day, Adam skipped school and Nathaniel saw him walking out to their carport with a giant bruise on his face. Nathaniel sported a similar one, fair warning from his mother not to associate with the local kids lest he blow their cover. But he didn’t skip class, and when he walked home later and saw Gansey’s vintage orange Camaro parked in front of the Parrish’s double-wide, he didn’t stop to say hello, and shuffled into the trailer and quietly closed the door to nurse his cuts and bruises in solitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRC crossover time again! This should be about the time in TRB between the Raven boys meeting and befriending Blue but before Blue and Gansey stumble on (spoiler!) Noah's remains, so no one really knows Noah's dead, and anyway it's irrelevant to the story, but it gives a lot of context to why Noah says the things he does to Nathaniel.
> 
> On Ronan: yes, he's a dick. This is TRB Ronan, who is a dick to everyone that isn't Gansey.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of my overly indulgent TRC character appearances, but not the last of my overly indulgent ridiculous plot points. This fanfic is literally just indulgences and crazy headcanons.

**Part 2: Body Parts  
Chapter 5**

He and Adam didn’t talk much after that. Mary insisted Nathaniel keep his head down and go to school and then directly home afterwards. Nathaniel was too afraid to go against Mary’s stern instructions to stay indoors, and the one time Adam had knocked hesitantly on their door one weekend to ask if Nathaniel wanted to play Exy with Blue and his other friends, Mary had coldly told the other boy that “Alex” was studying for an upcoming exam, and was not to be disturbed.

Blue, after their initial introduction, sat beside him in their shared math class, but said nothing to him until the Monday after that weekend when they invited him to play Exy.

Math came after lunch period and because Nathaniel usually had no appetite for lunch, and no inclination to spend it in the cafeteria with the crowd of other students going about their normal lives, wandered into class early, protein bar in one hand, and a pencil with a chewed off eraser in the other. He hadn’t finished the previous day’s homework, after he opted to go for a long run early that morning instead. He was getting antsy from having to stay indoors for so long, and now that he wasn’t allowed to associate with other teenagers his age again, his only outlet was running, and the occasional shooting practice when Mary had time to drive them out to the mountains.

Blue slid into the seat next to his a few minutes before the bell rang, and stared at him for a long moment before opening her mouth. 

“Adam’s got a similar bruise on his face,” she remarked.

Nathaniel slanted a glance at her, but she was bent over her textbook, doodling at the edges with a pastel orange gel pen. “His dad hits him.”

Blue didn’t reply. She probably already knew that for a fact, although to see the bruises was one thing, Nathaniel could hear Robert Parrish yelling all sorts of humiliating things to his son on an almost nightly basis, and the awful familiarity of it gave Nathaniel nightmares about knives and fists, red hair and icy blue eyes.

“Adam said your mom didn’t want you to talk to us,” she said after some time. “Does it have something to do with what Noah called you?”

He didn’t mean for his voice to sound so sharp when he replied, “He didn’t say anything.”

Blue held one hand up to calm him down. “Noah doesn’t mean anything by that. I don’t think he’s even met you before. I mean, Gansey and Ronan both say they’ve never seen you until we met you at Nino’s. And Noah’s been with those two since they started at Aglionby. Maybe you just remind him of someone?”

 _Maybe I just remind him of the Butcher of Baltimore,_ Nathaniel thought snidely in his head. Black hair and brown eyes weren’t exactly the best disguise, especially after he lost much of the baby fat around his face when he hit puberty. He could barely look at himself in the mirror now, so striking was his resemblance to his father, and the only thing he could hope for that was going for him these days was that Virginia was far enough from Maryland for these kids to have never heard of his father, much less seen what he looked like.

“Hey Alex.”

He frowned at his thoughts and turned to her. Blue had an odd smile on her face. 

“It just occurred to me, your voice hasn’t broken.”

Alex sat up slowly and turned. How did she know?

“I’m…” he trailed off and winced internally at the squeaky quality of his voice. Every other boy in their class spoke with much deeper baritones, and he still talked like a chipmunk.

Blue’s odd smile widened. “Late onset of puberty?”

He shrugged and tried to play it off. She couldn’t know he had just turned fourteen. All the papers his mother submitted to the school told the world he was sixteen, if a bit on the tiny, wispy side of sixteen.

“We’re playing Exy today,” she said just as the bell rang and students started to pour into the class. Nathaniel felt insanely relieved to be starting class so he could get away from Blue’s odd but kind banter. “You should really join us. Adam said you were interested.”

“I don’t have any gear,” he confessed softly. _And,_ he added to himself, _I don’t want to get beat up again._

The corners of Blue’s eyes crinkled when she smiled at him just as their math teacher swept in to start the class. “You can borrow some of mine. I’m sure they’d fit.”

 

She was not joking when she said her gear would fit him. 

After their last class let out earlier than usual, Nathaniel allowed himself to be steered out of the campus into the open door of Gansey’s orange Camaro idling at the curb a block from their school. Adam was in the passenger seat and greeted him with a reserved smile. Gansey gave a more enthusiastic fist bump to Blue and scratched his head sheepishly when Nathaniel stared at his fist blankly at his greeting.

The drive to the local community center was short, and by the time Gansey pulled up into the parking lot, Ronan was already geared up and playing idly with his racquet as he sat on the hood of his charcoal gray shark-nosed BMW. Noah sat quietly next to him, fuzzy and rumpled, still in his Aglionby sweater, and browsing through a magazine. He didn’t appear to notice when the other four arrived.

Gansey was quick to assign positions and they played scrimmages with Blue in the goal, and Gansey and Ronan paired against Adam and Nathaniel. It had been years since he last played in the little leagues back in Baltimore, but the footwork and defense still came easily to Nathaniel as he weaved through the two much taller boys to block their shots. Ronan was easily the better player than Gansey, he was taller, faster, and the more aggressive striker. Nathaniel was reminded of the time he played with Kevin Day and Riko Moriyama, and it was suddenly all he could do to wrench the memory of that day from his head, of what happened _after_ they played Exy, when Nathan gutted his math tutor in that conference room in Castle Evermore.

He glanced up, intending to signal a play to Adam but saw Noah in the stands instead, reading his magazine. Nathaniel wasn’t sure if it was his mind’s eye playing with him, but the cover of Noah’s magazine had Riko and Kevin’s smiling numbered faces. _Exy Darlings Introduce Their Number 3!_

He froze.

Adam shucked the ball in his direction, not noticing that Nathaniel wasn’t moving, and then Gansey was diving after it as it bounced on the far wall just behind him, bulldozing straight into Nathaniel’s unmoving body and knocking him to the floor hard enough to get the wind knocked out of his lungs completely.

“Oh my God!” Blue yelled as she ripped her helmet off and scrambled to where Gansey and Nathaniel lay in a heap. 

Gansey propped himself up on on arm, groaning an apology, but Nathaniel couldn’t move. It felt like all of his muscles had locked completely and the only thing that ran through his mind was that Riko and Kevin had found a number 3 for their Perfect Court, the number that, once upon a time, Nathaniel had dreamed could have been his.

“Alex, are you okay?” Gansey asked, pulling his gloves off to help him to his feet. 

Nathaniel focused on trying to get air into his lungs. He felt that his ribs had caved in from Gansey’s weight, but the force of the fall and the whoosh of air from Gansey’s movement wrenched him out of his thoughts. Adam and Ronan jogged over to where he lay on the floor, peering through the grilles of their helmets to ascertain for themselves that he wasn’t quite dead yet.

“I’m fine,” he said, scrambling up to his feet before Ronan yanked his arm to haul him up. Ronan and Adam’s twin quizzical stares bore into him until he turned away and he repeated, softly, “I’m fine.”

“Like hell you are,” Ronan snapped as he let go if his arm. Nathaniel felt around his chest to check for broken or dislocated bones and concluded he had none.

“You froze just as Gansey charged for the ball,” Adam said quietly, pulling up his stick and handed it to Nathaniel. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I just need a water break,” Nathaniel replied, and hurried away from their curious gaze to step outside the court to where Noah sat on the bleachers. He hovered over the blond boy for a while, pulling off his helmet and gloves and peering over his shoulder to try to get a glimpse of the magazine’s content.

“Oh!” Noah exclaimed, nearly dropping the magazine as he smiled up at Nathaniel. “They got Jean Moreau, did you know?”

Nathaniel didn’t know who Jean Moreau was, but Noah’s reply was so on point it was almost as if he read his mind.

“Number three,” Noah said patiently. “Here, it’s on page 5.”

He handed the magazine to Nathaniel, who devoured the article hungrily. There was an inset picture of a dark-haired boy, around the same age as Kevin and Riko, with pale gray eyes, a proud chin, and the number 3 etched on his right cheekbone. Kevin and Riko would be entering Edgar Allan University as freshmen in two years, and the article talked about Jean Moreau as having joined the two scions of Exy just in time.

Nathaniel was consumed by the article and the little tidbits of information on Kevin Day and Riko Moriyama that he failed to notice Noah smiling absently as he look at his sweat-damp hair. He reached one pale hand to a loose black tendril, as if to touch reverently.

“Your hair,” he said softly with a tiny note of wonder creeping through his voice.

Nathaniel shot up and stared. He tried to see, through the glare in the court plexi-glass, if his roots were showing, but they couldn’t have been. Mary had just touched them up three days ago and even if the tiniest amount of auburn were to have crept up, the dampness of his hair should have darkened it to almost black. He had no idea what Noah meant by the comment but after he had been called his real name just a few days back, he couldn't help the rising swell of panic bubbling up his throat.

He couldn’t hear anything over the sound of blood rushing in his ears. The world tilted sideways in his vision, grayed at the edges. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think past the sound of his mother’s harsh admonitions echoing in his mind over and over: _Do not talk to anyone. Trust no one. Run, Abram! Don’t stop running!_

And he did.

He didn’t stop until the world tilted rightways up.

 

He didn’t know where he was. Somehow, he must have shed whatever borrowed equipment Blue had lent him on his way out of the rec center because when his legs finally stopped moving from the burn of over-exerted muscles, when his breath finally felt like it wouldn’t explode out of his lungs in a rush of blood, adrenaline and bile, when he no longer felt like he had crosshairs on the back of his head glowing like a beacon for his father’s knives and guns, he finally stopped running.

He was on the street and it was nightfall. The cheap plastic watch on his wrist told him it was 9PM, three hours past the time his mother expected him to be back in the trailer, two hours past the time his mother would have gotten back from her job herself. He had lost so much time and space trying to get away from the echo of his mother’s voice in his head, trying to get away from the sound of Noah’s voice exposing his secrets to the world. 

The street was unfamiliar at night, but there was a bus stop at the corner. He had no idea if it would take him back to the trailer park, and from where he stood, he could not see which way led back to the rec center. The street was dark, silent. He was alone. But he was also weaponless and vulnerable and he had no idea how to get himself back where he came.

With a soundless breath that felt like capitulation, he walked to the bus stop to look for a way to get himself back.

It was 11PM by the time he trudged down the dusty, rutted drive into the trailer park. There was no light in the Parrish’s double-wide, but he shuddered inwardly when he saw the porch light on in the one he and his mother occupied. His legs and his lungs burned. His head spun with remembered panic and fear, and his mouth tasted sour from bile. The door swung open, and his mother’s face was impassive as she stepped aside to let him in.

“Your friend dropped your things off.” Her voice sounded like an accusation as she shut the door quietly and locked it. “You are lucky he didn’t try to look for a phone in your things.”

Nathaniel hung his head. He was too exhausted to feel the slight strain of desperation in his mother’s clipped words. If Adam had opened his duffel bag, he would have seen all of Nathaniel’s meager belongings: five changes of clothes, some bandages, a notebook for school. But worse than any signs of poverty would have been if Adam had discovered his binder. Hidden in plastic sleeves, between clipped newspaper and magazine articles about Riko Moriyama and Kevin Day were phone numbers of his mother’s contacts, written in code in plain note paper. He would have discovered the sheaves of bond notes, the inexplicable amounts of money… Nathaniel’s passports and driver’s licenses… not the ones that named him Alex Lawson, but a whole host of other names: Stefan, Chris, Evan, Jonathan. There were too many names, too many numbers, too much money. Worst of all, it would have been the end of him if Adam had discovered the gun hidden in one of Nathaniel’s socks.

“Where did you go, Abram?” Mary demanded, her voice quiet, lethal, as she exhaled a plume of smoke and stubbed out her cigarette on the ashtray sitting precariously on a ratty couch arm.

“I played Exy with some of Adam’s friends.” His confession sounded hollow in his ears. Too many times, his mother had repeated from him to stay away from people, even other boys and girls who seemed normal, quiet, safe. It wasn’t safe. Association wasn’t safe. Trust and friendship in a life on the run could get himself killed. Could get them both killed.

Worse still, she had warned him repeatedly to obsess over Exy from a distance. He didn’t understand why, just that it had to do with that awful summer day he spent in Castle Evermore, when the game he played with Riko Moriyama and Kevin Day was interrupted by his father murdering someone in one of the Evermore conference rooms.

The word _sorry_ was at the tip of his tongue, and would have slipped past, but Mary’s fists had always been faster. By the end of the night, Nathaniel was bruised and sore, and his mother’s mantra _Trust no one, keep running!_ was the only thing that he remembered before he crawled into the tight space in the twin bed he shared with his mother, his back to hers, his hand under his pillow, resting on the gun that Adam thankfully did not find.

His dreams about his father were more painful than Mary’s fists, but the feel of her back against his, the cold, heavy metal of his gun against his palm were silent reassurance that, for now, he was still safe. No thanks to his own stupidity and thanks to his mother’s tenacity, he was still safe. He could face another day of trusting no one and continuing to run.

* * *

There was a commotion at the Parrish trailer two nights later, but Nathaniel was too afraid to get up from the rickety table where he was doing his math homework to have a look. Mary was sitting at the couch, cleaning her gun, not six feet from where he sat. If he moved, if he so much as started as the yelling from the Parrish trailer got louder and louder, she would have shut him down so fast, his ears would be ringing from her punches. His bruises from the day she had beaten him up for breaking down so completely at the rec center that he forgot his duffel bag of secrets had barely healed, and he didn’t want to be adding more. 

Besides, the sound of Robert Parrish’s voice was loud enough to wake even the deaf old lady that lived at the very edge of the trailer park. It sounded like he and Adam were fighting over money again. Or more like he was yelling, and probably beating, Adam over money. Again. This shouldn’t be a surprise anymore, because Nathaniel heard the same tired shit from the Parrishes over and over, night after night.

He would have dismissed the sounds completely if he hadn’t heard Ronan’s voice join in the yelling. He was sorely tempted to get up and at least peek from the kitchen window, but Mary had a pointed brow cocked at his face as she oiled the barrel of her gun, before slowly putting it away.

“Don’t even think about it,” she whispered as she got up. “He is not your concern, and you are not his.”

Nathaniel nodded meekly and turned back to his textbook, willing his mind blank, and pushing all thought of fists and yelling and violence out of his head and concentrated on statistics.

He would have been successful if the stillness of the trailer park night wasn’t interrupted by the distant whine of police cars. It seemed someone finally called the cops on Robert Parrish.

But that wasn’t what had him springing to his feet and knocking his chair to the ground. His mother similarly moved with silent, purposeful intent as she nodded to him before flipping the lights and sidling up the windows.

“Shit,” she hissed as she peered out the living room window, into the sight of a cruiser maneuvering through the gutted driveway.

Nathaniel slid quietly to the kitchen to watch the scene unfold, hidden away in the darkness of their trailer. He could see the officer crouching over Adam, who was on his hands and knees in the dirt. More yelling. It looked like Ronan Lynch and Robert Parrish had come to blows. Another officer was trying to restrain the both of them, and Ronan was pushed into the cruiser in handcuffs.

“Shit,” Mary repeated as they saw more cops in the distance.

It was a disaster. Before long, the police would be going from door to door checking for witnesses. Before long, they would be trying to talk to Mary, to Nathaniel, to all of the neighborhood. Before long, someone would realize who they were. Nathaniel didn’t know if the Butcher of Baltimore exerted any influence over the police force in no-name Virginia, but Mary never put it past any law enforcement not to be in the pockets of one of the most feared criminals in the east coast.

“Get your things, Abram,” Mary murmured, gesturing at the room with her gun. They couldn’t let the cops see them.

Nathaniel crept quietly into the tiny bedroom he shared with his mother. His duffel bag was stuffed next to hers under the twin bed. His gun was on top, and he slid this in his back, secured to his body by the waistband of his pants. There were a few other spare IDs hidden in the bedding sewn onto the mattress. He ripped this off as quietly as he could manage, swiped the passports and cards and stuffed them in his pockets, and then grabbed his and his mother’s bags.

Mary had moved to the kitchen by the time he stepped out. The cops were outside, swarming, knocking on every door. Even with the lights out, the trailer shrouded in still, silent darkness, the police would still be alerted to their presence by the sight of the vehicle in the carport. If none of the other neighbors who had their lights on volunteered information, the cops would be knocking down their door in seconds.

Mary nodded to Nathaniel and he moved silently to the door leading to the back. They had perfected the art of silent communication in the years they had been running. Nathaniel paused only to pick up the burner phone Mary had left for him on the kitchen table, next to his discarded textbook.

There was no looking back. Nathaniel slipped quietly out into the night, to wait for his mother as she dealt with the cops, and resigned himself to another city, another name, another identity. 

As he stole through the dusty woods that hid the ugliness of the trailer park from the rest of Henrietta’s genteel population, he wondered if Adam was hurt, if Ronan had really been arrested, and decided it wasn’t as important as survival. They were not friends. Nathaniel was alone.

And he would wait alone until just before daybreak, when the police finally melted out into the night, and his mother was able to jump into their shitty car to drive them out of the speck of nowhere that was Henrietta, Virginia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter in this part. Thank you for indulging the utter randomness of these crossover chapters! Next, let's find out what happens to Natalie!


	11. Chapter 11

**Part 3: Bravery**

**Chapter 1**

It was dark when she came to.

She felt nothing, but saw and heard everything. The blinking lights of machinery in the room she was in were laser pinpricks that clamored in her swimming head for attention. There was noise--footsteps flapping outside her door. People yelling, “I need medical attention!” “Please!” “It hurts!”, an endless cacophony of vocalized pain. She’d heard it before. Where? She couldn’t remember.

She did not know where she was. She did not know who she was. Shrouded in darkness, surrounded by noise, she felt nothing.

She counted seconds at first. Because there was no feeling in anything in her body, she couldn’t move, except to swivel her gaze in the shroud of darkness of wherever it was she lay in. She was in a room, that much was certain. There were machines on both sides of her body, and the awful blinking lights kept buzzing into her consciousness, interrupting her thoughts. One said “Listen to me!” The others kept a constant clamor of “Look at me!” “No, me!” I’m the most important!”

She wanted to say they were all important, but the blinking lights weren’t talking. They were lights in a machine and she had to accept that it wasn’t going to be much help staring at them in silence and trying to personify them.

The seconds trickled into minutes, and still nothing. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out the ends of her toes jutting up from under thin fabric. A blanket. So she was in bed. And if there were machines blinking at her side, that meant she was in a hospital.

Gingerly, she willed her fingers to move. They would not.

Her toes refused to wiggle despite the fiercest desire from her brain to make them shake. Nothing would move. Nothing in the darkness. Nothing in white noise.

She was paralyzed.

For a seething minute, her thoughts raced into her brain:  _ Why couldn’t she move? Why was she hooked up to these machines? What had happened to her? _

The loudest question made it out of a mouth that finally worked despite the absolute mind-numbing certainty of paralysis of the rest of her body.

“Natalie.”

That was not a question. It was her name.

  
  
  


When she next woke, she wasn’t alone. It was day-time and the warm slanting light streaming through the open blinds told her it was late afternoon. The room as white, sterile. The smell of disinfectant assaulted her face. 

_ The hospital _ , she remembered. That was where she was. She was lying in a hospital bed, and the last time she was conscious she could not move except to stare at the blinking lights of the machines surrounding her, keeping her alive. She could see it now. There were wires tangled through her body ending in plaster patches hidden beneath the gray gown she wore. The white room was offset with white machinery, white blankets covering her body. She could see her hands, folded over the white sheets, and her skin looked like paper. She was fragile, vulnerable. White on white on white, and the only other shade she saw was gray.

There was an orderly, also in white, replacing the plastic bag of saline drip hung from a metal stand by her bed. She could move her head now.

Her fingers twitched. Her mouth worked, but her tongue was too heavy to form words.

_ Who are you? _ was what she said, but the only sound that escaped her was a gurgled croak. Her throat felt like it had been used as a pincushion. 

She was feeling again. And feeling meant an explosion of pain. Pain like she had never felt before. Pain like her insides wanted to burst out of her pores. Pain like her mind couldn’t bear the absolute madness of this drab white room, her sorry looking gown. Pain that could keep her awake. She struggled through the haze, trying to surface from the blinding white madness.

_ Get me out of here! _ Her eyes all but yelled, but she couldn’t speak through the weight of her tongue, the dry painful pricks in her throat, the unbearable whiteness of panic settling in her bones. She could feel, she could move, but she was trapped by the searing pain that enveloped her body and pinned her to the bed.

“Please,” was all she could muster. It was the only word that would leave her mouth, the only word her brain could form through the fog of excruciating sensation.

The orderly jumped. “Oh my God!”

Before she could get another sound out, before she could coax her extremities to move, the orderly flew out of the room, yelling for a doctor.

_ Please _ , she wanted to say.  _ Take it away _ . 

She couldn’t count the seconds she was awake. She couldn’t form thought beyond  _ hurt _ ,  _ pain _ , and  _ please, let it end _ !

It felt like ages before the orderly came back, with another figure, also shrouded in white. They were talking but her brain refused to make sense of the words. She couldn’t think.

_ Please take it away! _

There was movement, beyond the flurry of activity as nurses poured into the room, checking the machines, blabbering in words that sounded faraway and foreign. They moved around her, like pagans dancing towards an offering, but none coming near, for fear of being struck down. Vaguely, she realized she was the one that was moving. No, not moving. Writhing. Convulsing.

_ Let it end! _

Was she dying?

“Please!” Her voice was ragged, ripped from the core of her being. There was only so much she could take…

She scarcely felt the prick of the needle that pumped morphine into the ragged vein in the crook of her elbow. Relief was a slow trickle that pierced the haze.

Minutes, maybe centuries passed before the pain ended and coherent thought returned.

_ Please _ , she wanted to say again. She didn’t want to feel anything.

“Nathaniel…” she didn’t know if the name ever made it past the smothering of pain relief as the morphine washed into her veins and dragged her back into merciful darkness.

  
  
  


“She’s awake now, but she hasn’t spoken a word since she first came to, and that was over a week ago!”

The words came to her like a paean to an old god.  _ Wake up! _ was what it meant.  _ You’re alive and there are people to see you. _

She wanted to see no one.

The sterile white door of her hospital room swiveled open and admitted two middle-aged men in suits. They wore blue, which she thought was odd, and these were the first signs of color, she realized, that she saw when she first woke. The blue suits spoke to her.

_ Answers _ .

But not hers. Never hers.

One of the suits stood closer to her bedside, looking down at her with the oddest expression. It took her a while to recognize it. Pity.

“How are you feeling?” When the suit at her bedside spoke, the other suit who stood near the door fished into the pocket of his gray pants for a pen and a small notebook. She recognized them. Not their faces but what they were.

Cops.

She looked away without a word.

Her doctor, a pasty-faced woman with pale blond hair nearly the same color as her gown, clicked her tongue at the suits. “I don’t think she’s going to be ready to talk to you if you come here looking like that.”

She didn’t know how her doctor knew to interpret her silence since she never talked to anyone since she woke, but the woman was right. She had no interest in talking to cops, although there was a niggling in the back of her mind that told her she might remember more of she would just--

No, she remembered enough. She was Natalie. And she knew someone named Nathaniel. She was in a hospital, she was high on morphine about seventy percent of the time. And she was enveloped in excruciating pain the remaining thirty percent. Her doctor told her she had been stabbed. By who, she didn’t know. 

She had no recollection of what happened to her before she wound up at that hospital. She hadn’t the foggiest idea, even, where the hospital was located, although she heard mentions of Atlanta or Brunswick, so she may actually be in Georgia. She didn’t know if she was native, if she grew up here, if she was just passing through when she got attacked. She could only retain a few hazy details of her life before.

She was sixteen. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did, and it was one of the only details she let slip to a chatty nurse who was taking her blood pressure one late night. She was a recovering addict. That detail, she picked up from one of the doctors, who had noted the odd damage to her nasal passage, and the abnormal tremor in her pulse told her she had been addicted to cocaine, because if it had been heroin, the relief from the slow drip of morphine into her IV would be dramatically short-lived.

There were a few other details she could remember. They came to her in snatches of half-remembered dreams in the middle of feverish hallucinations for her drugs. Memories of a father, half-demented with finding his missing son. Cold tendrils of illusion about a mother who looked at her with chilling disinterest. She remembered blood, the feel of it in her hands, the coppery smell of it invading her senses, the slimy feel of it coagulating on cold concrete floor beneath her feet. She remembered a basement of horrors, screams that left her haunted and scrambling awake lest the echoes of it drive her insane. And over it all, she remembered sad blue eyes that stared at her into the late night, piercing through the fog of blood-tainted dreams. She remembered the soft, whispered plea of a little boy’s voice calling out to her for salvation when she was in the throes of convulsive pain.

Her doctor tapped her foot impatiently, her thin arms crossed over her white gown. “I told you we need some time to help her through her shock. She won’t even say her name.”

One of the suits shook his head and sighed, looking at her again with that same pitiful stare. “I know, but she’s a material witness to an attempted homicide, and the sooner we get answers to our questions, the easier it will be for us to catch whoever it was that did this to her.”

The other suit nodded and exchanged glances with his partner. They talked about her like she didn’t exist, and she let them.

She had no interest in talking to them. To everyone in the room, herself included, she was the silent Jane Doe who remembered nothing.

A few more tense minutes passed, and finally the suits both shook their heads and turned to leave.

She watched them impassively as they crossed the door, watched them silently as the doctor started to usher them away, and flip off the light to her room…

_ Answers _ .

She told herself she wanted them. She wanted to know those sad blue eyes, the soft whispered plea.

“Natalie,” she murmured, and it was almost too soft to miss, but the suits were paying attention, were desperate for a reaction, and they pushed past the doctor to crowd around her bed. She didn’t look at them as she picked at her blanket listlessly. “Natalie Wesninski.”

  
  


Somewhere between her seventy-thirty, she caught more glimpses of a past life. They flashed through her between fever dreams of drug withdrawal, tempered only by the slow niggling pain from the stitches she could feel in her back. She had told the suits her name, but refused to say anything more because she remembered nothing more, not who she was, not what she did. She could have been a two dollar crackwhore, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.

But when the suits left and she drifted between the twilight of sleep and consciousness, she remembered.

She was Natalie Wesninski. She was in Georgia because her brother had gone missing. He had been gone for weeks. Her father was looking for him. He had sent people after him. People with knives. People who would treat her brother like a slab of meat to be cut up like swine on a cold concrete table in the basement of their house. That smell of blood she couldn’t wash off her senses returned every time she remembered. It felt like a prick through the anxiety created by her drug withdrawals, and tempered only by morphine.

She was Natalie Wesninski, and she was in Georgia, where she found her brother, and they had been attacked.

In her dreams, she remembered running, remembered jumping out of a white Cadillac at the sight of sweat damp black hair, brown--not blue!--eyes, but the unmistakable face of her brother, who had turned at the sound of her voice, looked to her with immeasurable relief in the desperate lines of his young, pinched face. And then that relief contorted into unspeakable horror, and then all she knew was pain. Pain and then merciful black.

She dreamed of other things too. Mostly it was about blood, and knives, and screaming. She dreamed about loyalty and betrayal, of a dark, pretty woman with blood-red lips smiling at her like a vampire. She dreamed of a iron lady with steel gray eyes, a harsh tongue, and a funny accent. And always, she dreamed of auburn hair and sad blue eyes, small hands covered in blood, the sound of a hitching sob as she threaded a suture through pale, young skin split open with knives and violence, and colored by bruises. Sometimes, these dreams came to her even in her waking hours, licking at the edges of her consciousness as she started at the same four white walls that surrounded her bed. She wondered if she would go mad. She wondered if she already was mad, and was just attributing her madness to her desire for cocaine, or to the warm blanket of morphine in her bloodstream.


	12. Chapter 12

**Part 3: Bravery**  
**Chapter 2**

The suits came back to see her a few days later, with two other men in sharper, more officious looking gray suits. The blue suits looked positively like rural hicks next to the gray suits. They introduced themselves as Special Agents Browning and Gray. Browning was a burly man with a surly face, and Gray a severe woman with fiery orange hair that completely contrasted her name.

She studied them as they took places around her bed, ignoring warnings not to agitate the patient from a passing nurse. The gray suits were FBI and on the money. She knew this had something to do with her memories of blood, gore and basements.

“Hello, Natalie,” Gray said with a clipped, New York accent. She was a no-nonsense woman, with her orange hair tied severely at the nape of her neck, her mouth a thin line that quirked almost imperceptibly to betray her interest as she spoke to Natalie. “I’m sure you’re wondering why we’re here when Detectives Smith and Riley are convinced that the attack on you was a local drug-related crime.”

She said nothing, and wondered if her face betrayed her curiosity. She hadn’t known that was what the blue suits were thinking of whatever had befallen her that landed her in the hospital, but she let Gray keep talking in the hopes of finding out more.

“We were surprised when they contacted us in Maryland to inquire about a young woman who’s already been declared dead, and buried in a closed casket Jewish funeral three weeks ago.”

So she was dead. Or supposedly dead. Her father--

“We’re here because we suspect your father, Nathan Wesninski, is involved in a string of murders and missing persons stretching from New York to Maryland. You wouldn’t know anything about the Butcher of Baltimore?”

Oh she knew about him. She remembered… but she wasn’t going to speak. Her father did not do this to her.

“Was he behind your attack?”

Still she said nothing. Loyalty was what bound her to her father. She was Nathan’s princess. She remembered.

Gray paused only a minute to gauge her non-response. And then she said the one thing that Natalie knew would turn her world upside down since she started to catch glimpses of her life through her fever dreams.

“Do you know anything about the deaths of your mother, Mary, and your brother, Nathaniel?”

The name washed over her like ice cold dread. Nathaniel.

“He’s dead?” Her voice was hoarse from disuse, but she needed to know.

“Car accident,” Browning grunted, not looking at her. “Also closed casket.”

Gray smiled coldly. “Your father faced a lot of loss in the few weeks you were out.”

Pain and loss and mania and obsession with finding Nathaniel. Finding and punishing him, and their mother. She remembered.

Sad blue eyes, whispered pleas, blood.

She turned away from the suits. “Is this true?”

Gray sniffed. “We were hoping you could tell us.”

She didn’t want to. Because she didn’t want to believe it true. She was in Georgia, she’d stolen away when Romero and Lola were leaving Maryland to look for Nathaniel after a tip came in that he and Mary were spotted in an abandoned warehouse in Brunswick. She remembered his relief, almost palpable, at the sight of her face, the sound of her voice. She remembered his horror.

“He’s alive,” she whispered into nothing. She wasn’t talking to the suits. She was finding her memories, finding Nathaniel in them. “They didn’t kill him.”

Gray inclined her head, the shine in her orange ponytail rippling in the blinding whiteness of the hospital room. Distracting. She remembered Nathaniel and the fire in his auburn hair, so very like Nathan’s.

“They? You mean your father and his people?”

She shook her head, her mouse-brown hair was a long, frizzy tangled halo around her head. “They weren’t there,” she said, her voice dead. “My father had nothing to do with their disappearance. He’s not--”

“But he is,” Browning interrupted impatiently.

Natalie regarded him with cool defiance. “And you know that how?”

“We have evidence of--”

“You have nothing,” she cut into his tirade before he could start. She didn’t trust that her face wouldn’t betray her if she was this doped to the gills and yet still craving cocaine.

She sighed. She was tired. She wanted to be left alone with her memories. But now that she’d confirmed what she knew about Nathaniel and Mary, she didn’t think the suits would leave her alone.

“I know nothing about what my father does; he’s a businessman, I’m sixteen.” She glanced shrewdly at Gray’s face, at the barely hidden skeptical disdain in the curl of her thin lips. “But I can tell you something else.”

“Oh?” Gray mocked, even as Browning looked back at her. “And what would that be?”

Her memory was a floodgate when she spoke. She remembered.

Everything.

“Do you know Joseph Kavinsky?” She smiled at the glimmer of interest in Gray’s eyes. She was from New York. She would know. About the drugs distributed in posh private schools, in the backseats of fancy sports cars. “He was my boyfriend. And, oh, the stories I could tell about him and his father.”

Gray and Browning exchanged glances again and she could see it, the hunger and glory in Gray’s severe face, the apprehension in Browning’s as Natalie started to talk. And talk. And talk.

  


Gray and Browning brought her down to the FBI office in Atlanta a few weeks later to sign her sworn statement (she maintained that she had no recollection of how she got stabbed, or even how she ended up in Georgia, and willingly talked only of what she knew of the Kavinsky drug empire) and to discuss her fate. Browning was adamant that she was not to be released back to Nathan Wesninski, as he was convinced the Butcher would murder his own daughter, despite Natalie ascertaining that her father loved her and that she would be happiest if she was returned to Baltimore without further delay. But she was a minor, and her mother was legally dead, her father a suspected criminal.

Child Protective Services was called.

Natalie wanted to tune them out. She wasn’t interested in her fate, but she needed to get out of the hospital, and she needed to look for Nathaniel. She hadn’t the faintest idea where to look, and she knew her only lead to him would surface if only she returned to Baltimore. Lola, Romero and Jackson would find him. They would find him to be punished by the Butcher, but Natalie would protect him. She would kill them all if she had to; she would betray the father who loved her to protect the brother she loved above everything and everyone. She’d let Nathaniel down the very last time the day her father discovered that Mary had stolen him away on their way to Castle Evermore.

She was going into the Witness Protection Program. Gray had leaned heavily on this with CPS to ensure that they would be able to protect Natalie, and keep in touch with her for the FBI’s Kavinsky operation. CPS would find her a foster family, the FBI would erase any record of her existence as Natalie Wesninski.

She would have a new name.

She would live in a completely different state, with strangers for a family.

If the thought terrified her, she smothered it down quickly with the burning desire that a foster family would give her access to resources she needed to find her brother. She needed him more than she needed cocaine, more than she needed to be rid of the stitches in her back, more than she needed to know what had happened to her in Brunswick that landed her in a coma. She wanted to kill Mary for stealing him.

“Natalie,” Gray said, her voice turning sharp with her impatience. She had evidently been trying to get her attention for some time.

She turned mechanically. She wanted to rail at Gray for focusing on her Kavinsky expose and not on helping her find her brother. But it was all right. If Nathaniel wasn’t found, if he had a closed casket funeral orchestrated by Nathan, it meant he hadn’t been found by their father. It meant he was still alive, as alive as the hatred Natalie felt for Mary. As alive as the murderous intent she felt when the painful memories of Nathaniel’s abuse at her father and his henchmen’s hands resurfaced. As alive as the despair in her heart for letting him down, for never being able to protect him.

“What more do you want from me?”

It was a question of the exhausted. They’d gotten what they wanted from her. She wished she could just be left alone to look for her brother, to deal with her withdrawal. She wished they would just return her to her father, but that, it seemed, was completely out of the question.

“The program has a safehouse for children like you under our protection. CPS will get back to us in a week with your new family. In the meantime, you will have to stay with us, while we work out your new identity.”

She waved her hand carelessly. She wasn’t interested.

“Do what you want.”

Gray looked, for all that she had been so smug and self-satisfied with Natalie’s information, unhappy with her answer. She looked tired. “Natalie, we want to protect you, and we can do that only if you cooperate with us.”

She didn’t look up. “What do you want me to do then? You won’t return me to my father, no one could possibly want to adopt a drug-addicted teenager. You won’t help me find my mother and my brother. So I have to ask you, Agent Gray: what do you want me to do?!”

Gray sighed. “We’ll start with your name change tomorrow. Next week, we will have a plastic surgeon assess you. The best way we can protect you is if you completely shed your life as Natalie Wesninski, and that includes your face as Natalie Wesninski.”

So she would be a no-name. A no-face. How fitting a punishment. She had been plain and unremarkable before. Now she would be nonexistent.

“We’ve filled out a background sheet for you to review, if you would just take the time.”

There was nothing else to do but to follow Gray. She would have to hope that CPS come through with the foster, one that would help her with what she needed.

She needed someone to help her investigate Nathaniel’s trail. Preferably someone her father would never be able to pay off when the time and opportunity came. She could never fail Nathaniel again.

  


The next morning, she was a new person with the name Renee Shields. She came from Detroit, she was a recovering addict. She came from a street gang. It would be the only plausible explanation for her penchant for knives, for her knowledge in fighting, for her instinct to fight and maim and kill.

The person from Witness Protection came to meet her later with the plastic surgeon they consulted for helping people change their looks completely to disappear in the program. The surgeon didn’t look like much, so Natalie could only trust that he knew what he would be doing when Witness Protection suggested they change the look of her ethnicity completely, by erasing her bland white girl features.

Three weeks later, she had monolids and a smaller, thinner nose that made her look vaguely Asian, with her pale, sallow skin and delicate features. The surgeon advised her on changing her hair color to go with the surgery.

CPS came calling not long after that with a foster family. Natalie had no idea there would be people who would bother associating with the likes of her.

Her name was Stephanie Walker. She lived in North Dakota, and she was an investigative journalist.

If Natalie had a soul, she would have prayed with all of it to a god she wasn’t sure was listening, and thanked high heavens (and maybe hell and the devil) for the first real break in her search, a real fighting chance to finally find Nathaniel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I have no idea how these FBI and CPS things work. Everything I know, I've seen on TV.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Discussions of rape and drug addiction.

**Part 3: Bravery**

**Chapter 3**

 

The cold gray tile of the interrogation room matched the ice grip in her throat as she drummed her fingers nervously on the nondescript table while she awaited her fate. Somewhere outside, Stephanie Walker discussed the terms of her arrest with the lawyer she had had to hire. 

 

This wasn’t Natalie’s first brush with the law since Atlanta.

 

Scratch that. Her name was Renee now. She looked nothing like Natalie anymore either, with her surgically altered features, the bleached platinum hair, dyed originally to match Stephanie’s pale yellow locks so she wouldn’t look too out of place in the Walker household. She’d bleached it even further out of spite because she had no intention of matching their quiet, suburban life. It had been almost a year since they’d first met in Atlanta. 

 

And what a tumultuous year that was. She was surprised Stephanie had not bothered to return her to CPS, with the endless drug possession charges, the truancy at school, flunking out of her junior year from the nice, clean-cut Catholic school they had afforded her. She knew what the cops in small-town North Dakota was saying about her. She was lucky to even be in Walker’s house. She was just another foster, just another troubled kid and the Walkers really didn’t have to waste any time with her, especially with all the trouble she brought them.

 

But the charge this time wasn’t some minor deal and with the fake background the FBI gave her, and her record, the courts wanted to try her as an adult for the assault.

 

What a joke that was.

 

She glared at the wide mirror across her that she knew was two-way. She knew there were blue suits standing on the opposite side of the mirror, watching her squirm, watching her dig her grave even further. This Renee Shields persona sucked so hard she wished the FBI had just left her to her devices to look for a way back to Maryland.

 

The door swiveled open.

 

Renee didn’t look up. She had no interest in Stephanie and John’s regretful faces, or their pity, or the news that she would probably be going back to CPS, or jail, whatever it was. It was just a couple more months before she turned eighteen and then when she got out, she would go back to Maryland to find the lead she needed to find him. Her brother. Nathaniel.

 

The voice that greeted her when the door closed was brisk, clipped. New York accent. “Hello, Renee.”

 

Finally, she looked up. The smile that tugged at the corner of her cracked lips was dry, self-deprecating. “We meet again, Agent Gray.”

 

Gray didn’t smile at her. She’d changed in the year they had not seen each other. She looked older, more tired, less of that spark she had when Natalie Wesninski first disclosed about her associations with the Kavinsky crime family. The hard white light that bounced off the table gleamed dully in her pale eyes and washed out orange hair tinged with silver.

 

“I wish we didn’t have to meet in another interrogation room,” Gray said conversationally as she moved to sit in front of Renee. Her large, heavy watch clicked too loudly on the wood of the table. “Do you know this isn’t the first time West Fargo police called me about you?”

 

Renee feigned surprise. Of course she knew. She was Gray’s star witness in the case she was putting together against the Kavinskys. So far, Gray had not called on Renee yet for a testimony, likely saving that for when she finally collared the head honchos. And Renee had been following the news. Vasil Kavinsky had not yet been caught, though he was probably in hiding after his son met an untimely end in a freak fireworks accident somewhere in no-name Virginia. And with the current charge against her, Renee would probably never be called to a witness stand. She was too unreliable a witness to put under scrutiny, with her drug charges, her reputation, and now, this current assault charge.

 

“I didn’t know you cared,” she said, the smile in her mouth not quite touching her eyes. “What do you want? Is Stephanie shoving me back down your throat?”

 

Gray sighed. “All things considered, Stephanie should’ve put you back in the system way before now. At least we wouldn’t be looking at you for a murder charge.”

 

Now Renee really smiled. “So he’s dead.” Huh. Last she’d heard, the bastard she’d knifed was still in the hospital. This was the first bit of good news that had gotten back to her since she spent the past week in jail while Stephanie worked on her bond.

 

“Yes he’s dead. Was he your dealer?”

 

Renee shrugged. What did it matter if that asshole sold her drugs? He gave her information too. Information she’d been trying to use to find Nathaniel’s trail. Information she’d been trying to use to reach her father, her real father, not that foster imposter out in the bullpen talking to the police.

 

“Why did you kill him?”

 

Renee rolled her eyes. “Why do you think?”

 

Gray shook her head. “This isn’t an interrogation, Renee. The police have already talked to you about that. I want the truth.”

 

Her mouth twisted. “You have the truth.” It was just that no one would believe her. She was still the gangland girl in the middle class neighborhood after all. No one ever believed troublemakers, least of all one with a record.

 

“Stephanie believes you,” Gray said, her voice impassive.

 

“I don’t care.” 

 

Gray tapped a neatly manicured nail on the table. “You don’t think she’s doing her best to keep you out of prison?”

 

Renee rolled her eyes. “She could send me to State for all I care.”

 

“Stop doing that.”

 

She closed her eyes and huffed. What was it with these adults? They didn’t believe her when she said the assault, the homicide, was justified. They didn’t believe her when she said she was raped. They didn’t believe her when she said she wasn’t high. They didn’t want to send her back to CPS, didn’t want to send her to prison, didn’t want to wash their hands off her to just leave her to deal with her fate. And yet none of them would give her what she wanted. It was just the right kind of fucked up life she should’ve expected the moment she stole away into that Cadillac to hitch a ride with Romero and Lola to Georgia.

 

Gray stood finally when Renee wouldn’t say anything else. “Just so you know, Don Fields worked for Kavinsky. We’ve turned over the information we have on him to the West Fargo police department. With the rape kit, your testimony, and Stephanie’s influence, if they find you guilty, the most you’ll probably get is manslaughter, three to five years.”

 

Five years. Renee could work with five years. By then, she would be twenty two, a legal adult, maybe with no money to her name, but she could hitch rides across the Interstate back into Baltimore. Nathan would be more than happy to take her back. She was the princess of his empire after all.

 

“If they find me guilty…” she trailed off. “Do you think it wasn’t justified?”

 

Gray shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter what I think.” She smiled, a cold unkind look in her eyes. “Of course, with you in prison, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about where to find you when the Kavinsky case finally blows up.”

 

“Fuck you,” Renee said with no heat. She was done talking. She was tired of it all, scraped raw, with the endless questions, the disbelief from law enforcement, the sad, pitying gaze of the Walkers when they first came to see her. She wanted to go back to the holding cell so people would just stop talking to her, talking about her, talking over her, like she didn’t exist.

 

Gray didn’t bother to reply, and left, but Renee wasn’t so lucky to be left alone or to be cuffed again and led back to her cell. Stephanie was waiting at the door with the lawyer.

 

The warm smile on her thin lips faltered when Renee hurled herself insolently back into her seat. The lawyer didn’t waste time talking and put his briefcase on the table, clicked it open and shuffled papers out.

 

“I signed the confession already,” Renee bit out and refused to look at them, skittering away from when Stephanie reached a hand to touch her. She didn’t want to admit that the troubled look in Stephanie’s eyes stung her. She didn’t want to let herself believe that she cared. No one cared; not since Natalie Wesninski woke up with a perforated lung in that Georgia hospital. All anyone ever cared about was for what she knew.

 

“Renee,” Stephanie said hesitantly. It was so unlike her. The Stephanie Walker that Renee saw in the few times she’d ever bothered to stay in her home and not slumming around with the dregs of North Dakota society was a creature cast in stone, hard and determined, both in her work as a journalist, and in making the family she had with her pastor husband and her troubled foster child work.

 

“This isn’t about the case,” the lawyer, a Mr. Mahoney, probably related to the mayor, said crisply. “We’ve got that under wraps. You’re going to rehab, young woman, not prison. Agent Gray’s information on Fields is enough to convince the state not to charge you, on top of the results of the rape kit.”

 

“Rehab, huh.” Renee thought about how her nose itched from snorting coke, how her fingers twitched from the creeping withdrawal. 

 

The truth was she had never been able to shake her drug habit in the year since she was moved from Atlanta to North Dakota. And if she was truly being honest with herself, it was the main reason why she had, even now, zero leads on finding her brother. Half the money she got from her allowances and the part time jobs she worked went to feeding her drug habit, instead of finding solid leads on her brother. All the information she had been working with came from Fields, and now that she knew he was working for Kavinsky, that information was probably bogus, meant to string her along so he could draw her in and attack her. She wondered if he knew about her real identity, if Kavinsky had hired him to destroy her after what she had disclosed to destroy them.

 

“Yes, rehab,” Mahoney said even as he pushed papers in front of her.

 

She glanced at the printed documents, her eyes widening even as the words swam in her vision. “What’s this? This isn’t about rehab.”

 

This time, it was Stephanie who shook her head. She looked at her with kind eyes, but did not try to touch her this time. “No, Renee. John and I want to adopt you.”

 

* * *

 

Adoption was a funny thing.

 

Renee wanted nothing to do with the Walkers when she first arrived in North Dakota. She didn’t want their charity: she had a family of her own and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just go home to Baltimore and be done with everything. It wasn’t that the Walkers were unkind. Quite the opposite, rather, in that Stephanie and John were unfailingly understanding of Renee’s situation. 

 

At first, she thought it was just the kind of bleeding hearts they were--John was a lay pastor at a local Catholic church and Stephanie made them all go to church every Sunday, even though Renee never participated in all the weird Catholic rituals. She’d never been religious; the Wesninski family was Jewish but Nathan never made his children observe since he was too busy killing people (and, Renee thought privately, abusing his son), but she went along with the Walkers’ to keep up appearances just enough to get Stephanie off her back whenever she disappeared to get high or look for drugs.

 

She wasn’t sure what had changed when she was finally allowed to go home. Three months spent getting clean in rehab, and getting the right counseling for the trauma on the Fields attack left her flat-footed in her approach as she stepped out of Stephanie’s car. She hadn’t tried to touch her or force her into anything she didn’t like to do since she picked her up from the rehab facility. Renee didn’t know how to feel about this consideration. She didn’t  _ want _ to be touched still. Her skin crawled with remembered pain, even though whatever bruises and injuries she’d sustained when Fields attacked her had faded into nothingness on her paper-like skin.

 

Stephanie stood at her side, smiling kindly as she waited for Renee to get her things from the backseat. “John’s not home yet, but we’ll have dinner together later. Would that be all right?”

 

She narrowed her eyes, looking up at the two-story house that would now be her home. She was no longer Renee Shields. She hadn’t been Natalie Wesninski for a year, and now she didn’t know how to fit herself in Renee Walker’s shoes. She didn’t know if she could shed the gangland persona, the mobster’s daughter mantle, to fit into this quiet, suburban life.

 

She didn’t even know why Stephanie would want to adopt a seventeen year old drug addict who was just a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday. She could have just as well left Renee strung out after rehab and be done with her already. She would’ve saved herself the trouble of trying to bring up a dysfunctional child who didn’t know how to be normal.

 

“Why are you doing this?” she murmured. She couldn’t understand any of it.

 

Stephanie moved to unlock the front door. She’d given Renee a copy of the house keys when she picked her up at the rehab center. It was a finalization of the adoption, a silent gesture to say “Where I live is your home now too.” It was the culmination, the end of Natalie Wesninski, of the fake persona of Renee Shields, and the birth of a real person, Renee Walker.

 

She opened the door and stepped aside to let Renee in first, her smile didn’t falter when Renee hesitated at the threshold before stepping in. “Do you remember the Beatitudes? Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount?” When she didn’t reply, Stephanie went on. “God blesses those who are poor in spirit, according to the Beautitudes, and those of us that have been blessed on this earth are called to be merciful to those in need of it.”

 

Renee scowled. She didn’t want or need mercy from anyone, least of all a suburban family living the American dream, but Stephanie continued talking when she saw her expression darken.

 

“I know you think you don’t need platitudes from what you may see as a dead church to live your life, Renee, but mercy isn’t just about staying a hand from violence. It’s about providing shelter for those who need it, about opening your heart to love for others who need warmth, and familiarity, maybe even salvation.” She moved to the counter to hook her keys on the wooden key holder that had her name under the hook. Renee was surprised to see that there was a third hook now, labeled Natalie Renee in cursive silver marker. She was surprised to see that Stephanie was doing nothing to erase the Natalie persona from her life.

 

Stephanie gestured quietly to allow her to hook her own keys into the key holder. The expression in her eyes made something in Renee’s chest feel faint. Something like a flutter went through her throat, threatening to bubble out.

 

“Salvation isn’t just about saving what you believe may be your damned soul, Renee. In the twenty-first century, not everyone believes in saving the soul, but it’s there, and the first step towards it is saving your earthly life.” She smiled again, her palm outstretched but not reaching for Renee as she inched closer to hook her keys up, still marveling at the sight of her name. “To save your earthly life doesn’t mean we just wipe the slate clean and forgive and forget. There are things to be learned from the life you’ve had before, and that’s why it’s never a good idea to forget who you were.” She gestured at the name.

 

Renee nodded. “Do you know who I was?” She didn’t mean Renee Shields. If Stephanie knew her name was Natalie, she had to have known she was the daughter of the Butcher of Baltimore.

 

“I know enough. I’m not judging you; you had to have your reasons to disclose what you did to the FBI.”

 

_ He’s my dad! _ she wanted to argue, but stilled her tongue at the look in Stephanie’s eyes, the tightness in her chest. She was too afraid to say what needed to be said: that even though Nathan was to blame for his wife and son’s disappearance, Natalie was equally culpable for never having reported Nathaniel’s abuse to the right authorities. Instead, she even helped her father weed out informants and traitors in his ranks, infiltrators who could have helped her brother. There was too much guilt brewing in the pit of her stomach, guilt she had never acknowledged all her life. Guilt that trumped even the feeling of disgust that crawled through her skin at her more recent trauma.

 

She didn’t really want to talk about it but Stephanie had already opened that can of worms and there was no use denying what she knew, what she wanted to know.

 

“Do you know what happened to him?” She didn’t want to hope that Stephanie would have any information about her family, but what was always in the forefront of her mind was looking for her brother.

 

Stephanie looked as if she was assessing her with the question. “I’m going to get our dinner started, and I can tell you a story while we cook. Does that sound good to you?”

 

Renee didn’t know what she was getting into but this was her home now and there was nothing else to be done but agree to Stephanie Walker’s proposal. They would cook paella and Stephanie regaled her with a story she had been investigating when she was in France.

 

The story went like this:

 

Once upon a time, there was a crime family in Marseille that trafficked people into and out of Europe. One day, they pulled out their resources on their usual haunts in the waterfront to await the boats containing their human cargo to look within the city for a wanted person. Stephanie did not know exactly why the crime family was looking for this person; her guess was that the target may have angered more powerful associates of the French mafia. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter to the story. What mattered was that the mafia searched and searched and turned Marseille’s underbelly inside out, but their target was a shadow that constantly stayed one step ahead of them. The search lasted three months before they caught up with the shadow in the slums of the city, and like a real action movie, the shadow disappeared in a hail of bullets into the docks.

 

“Who was it?” Renee asked, enraptured in spite of herself, as she help Stephanie chop vegetables that would go into the paella.

 

“It was a mother and son tandem.” Her smile was wicked when she looked up from her chopped carrots. “You would like them, I think. Nobody could confirm their identity but I heard from the grapevine that the woman’s name is Mary Hatford.”

 

Her breath caught and she nearly chopped her finger off when she dropped her knife. She shook her head. “What happened to the mafia?”

 

“Oh, rumor has it the godfather was in severe debt to whoever was after their shadow. I heard that he was going to send them his son as reparation for not having caught the target.” She shook her head. “Human traffickers are the most grim and disgusting creatures in the criminal underworld.”

 

“Next to drug lords and rapists,” Renee muttered under her breath, but she kept her voice quiet. She didn’t need to be thinking about her own issues right now. Right now, she needed to know what happened to Nathaniel. “Did they escape? The target?”

 

Stephanie smiled kindly at her again. “I would assume they did. No one heard about them in France again, so maybe they smuggled out of Europe? They were already at the docks when the firefight broke out.” She took the vegetables and dropped it into the pan with the rice and oil simmering in low heat. “It’s an interesting story, don’t you think?”

 

Interesting was one way to put it. Renee wondered if she tried hard enough to fit in, to be good, to be the suburban child the Walkers were looking for, if Stephanie would tell her more.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Renee's redemption arc kills me. I'm sorry it took me months to finish this chapter. It was really difficult to write. There's 1 more chapter about Renee (I think) and I hopefully won't take another 10 years to finish that, but I have trouble writing about religious stuff and obviously, Renee's life with the Walkers center around a lot of religious discussion.
> 
> Also, driveby Jean Moreau love. Poor bby got sold to the Moriyamas coz his family couldn't catch Mary and Nathaniel.

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the next unoriginal work in my queue!
> 
> The idea(s) for this fanfic came to me browsing the AO3 Neil/Andrew tag, because I am andreil trash. But also because I've always liked the idea of Renee being Neil's older sister. So here.
> 
> Watch me vomit chapter after chapter of blood, gore and violence, before we ever get to the ship.


End file.
